Customer

Symantec Corporation is a world leader in providing solutions that help individuals and enterprises assure the availability, security, and integrity of their information. Founded in 1982, Symantec consists of more than 14,000 employees and operates in more than 40 countries. Symantec's headquarters is located in Cupertino, Calif., and its primary manufacturing facility in Dublin, Ireland. 

Challenge

Symantec provides a wide range of solutions, including enterprise and consumer security, data management, application and infrastructure management, security management, storage and service management, and response and managed security services. 

Symantec was looking for software services vendors in Eastern Europe to outsource testing and localization of their products destined for European countries. After evaluating a number of companies through several stages of a selection process, ELEKS was added to Symantec's list of approved outsourcing vendors.

The desired vendor requirements included:

• experience in software industry and high-level organization and project management appropriate for Symantec's sophisticated processes and high security levels
• business approaches that assure flexibility as well as quick and smooth integration into Symantec workflow 
• team scalability, and
• ability to grasp Symantec's processes, use its specific tools and documentation.  

Additional factors that made ELEKS Software the best vendor for Symantec to select, included: 

• proven record of efficient recruiting management and fast newcomer involvement
• employees' good command of English
• flexibility and dedication to customer's
  success.

Getting Started

Organizational and Technical Steps to Meet the Customer's Requirements

In order to meet Symantec's requirements to software localization and QA activities, ELEKS established a dedicated software servers and dedicated application servers localization team.

Work day shift was determined to be from 9 AM - 6 PM GMT, to correspond to Dublin, Ireland, business time. ELEKS team was equipped with hardware arranged according to the topology required by Symantec.

A completely separate network, with secure uploads and downloads between customer and workstations, was created. ELEKS' local computer network was used to pass the encrypted traffic from/to the customer segment.

Training

ELEKS project managers had onsite training at Symantec Corporation. In addition to technical skills, this training helped ELEKS' specialists to better understand the customer, at the level of corporate culture and business approaches. To share the obtained knowledge, ELEKS provided coaching for the rest of ELEKS' Symantec Centre team.

ELEKS-Symantec Team Extention In Q3 2005 

To launch ELEKS-Symantec Centre on time, it was expected to conduct quick recruitment of appropriate specialists. Thus, a sophisticated recruiting procedure was developed and implemented. It included several stages, namely: a detailed hiring plan, an English exam, and a special practical test.

• ELEKS Software advertisements were placed at special online and off-line mass-media, local universities and high schools. We also used services of recruiting agencies.
• Our HR team reviewed all incoming CVs and assigned initial interviews.
• Every candidate took a special exam in English.
• Candidates had a specialized written test in QA area.
• Candidates had a practical QA test.
• The task was to find as many “bugs” in the test application as possible and to correctly classify and describe these bugs.
• The test approach and the application were developed internally and are the property of ELEKS Software.
• Interviews were assigned to candidates who passed the initial interview and all quality tests. PMs also participated in those interviews.
• We provided internal training for newcomers according to customer's specifications.
• After the internal training, all participants took an online assessment, provided by Symantec. Only those people who passed all the above-mentioned stages were finally hired by ELEKS Software.
• The real project started. 

Employee selection process 

ELEKS had to increase its Symantec QA team from 10 to 28 members in 30 working days. Here is some statistics on the recruiting process:

• ELEKS Software received 153 CVs
• Initial interview was passed by 89 candidates
• After the 6th stage (see the above table) 47 candidates were eliminated
• Interview with PM was passed by 20 candidates
• Exam provided by Symantec was passed by 85% of trainees  
• As a result, ELEKS hired 18 QA specialists during 30 working days in June-July, 2005. 

Work Organization and Communication

To be successful with Symantec software localization and QA projects, ELEKS initiated the following business approaches:

• Timely co-ordination of oncoming project stages and details.
• Close communication with Symantec team via email correspondence, instant messaging, and conference calls.
• Storing detected bugs and issues in an online storage for easy access.
• Daily project status reports, to keep the customer informed on project progress.
• Creation of a project documentation library which contains structured coaching information, instructions for typical activities, project status snapshots, and activity control forms. 
• Deep analysis of each completed project, to identify best practices and lessons learned.
• Determination of steps for improvement to be implemented during next projects.

To improve process efficiency, ELEKS team introduced the following practices: 

• Regular internal ELEKS trainings for Symantec team.
• A three-level hierarchy for the Symantec team, to ensure quick team increase, effective knowledge transfer and proper supervision.
• Own automation tools, to speed processes at ELEKS - Symantec Test Centre.  

Results

ELEKS Software forged a strategic cooperation with Symantec and became a natural and seamless extension of the Symantec team. As a result of almost 3.5 years of collaboration between ELEKS and Symantec, we have localized about 19 projects and tested about 104 small and 24 large projects. ELEKS succeeded in being on schedule and got positive feedback at the end of each project. A number of Symantec projects are still in progress at the moment.