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Being part of a SaaS (Software as a Service) company means being part of a structure that evolves with the software’s technical developments. However, it is important not to lose sight of the market for which the software is developed.

An article by Camille Bouin

I work in the public transportation sector, specifically in Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT), a flexible transportation service that is an alternative to cars and taxis, and adapts to different audiences and use cases, while reducing the environmental impact of transportation. I work for Padam Mobility, which offers a transportation optimisation algorithm and a suite of interfaces necessary for operating a DRT service: user interfaces to facilitate user travel, a driver interface suitable for any type of operation, and a management interface for operators and transport authorities.

In this sector, I have noticed that managing digitalisation projects in a constantly evolving software context leads to high complexity.

The objective of this article is to understand the interactions and analyse the challenges between the digitalisation of DRT and software developments, in order to provide solutions.

First, we will look at the management of transportation projects, and then we will focus on technical projects in a second step. Finally, we will understand their parallel modes of operation.

Transportation project management

My core business is the management of projects to set up Demand-Responsive Transport services in rural and suburban areas.

In this sector, projects can present complex challenges in many ways:

• The evolution of digitalisation tools for managing DRT services and the change management challenges that this entails,
• The political challenges of local governments and the resulting deadlines,
• The challenges of carriers in a context of a shortage of labour,
• The pressure of public opinion from end users of the service on politics and carriers,
• The scalability of service offerings and demand depending on current events,
• Financial constraints and variations in allocated budgets.

Project management, both in terms of content and change management, or monitoring and meeting deadlines, is therefore a daily challenge. Furthermore, public tenders can take time to validate, and obtaining final launch dates for projects can be complicated. Once the project has begun, project teams often have to be able to deliver the DRT offer within a 2-3 month timeframe depending on the complexity of the project.

The challenges mentioned above are often multiplied with the volatility of the market and the growing importance of taking environmental impact into account in the transportation sector. This last point has a strong impact on the software évolutions that need to be developed to meet customer needs.

Technical project management

To answer to the constant changes in the DRT market, the software must remain in constant evolution.

The software development strategy of a SaaS company, by nature, must be done with the goal of responding to a need common to all or the majority of users, and not a unique or specific need. Based on this principle, there is therefore no technical team dedicated to a specific client.

Most often, project management is done in parallel, within product teams (with a focus on identifying needs) and development teams (with a focus on providing the solution itself). These teams are organized using the agile method, with short development cycles of about two months, divided into two-week sprints. While project management using the agile method is more advanced and allows for some speed of evolution, the complexity of the software adds difficulties in development, making some changes uncertain both in terms of their deadlines and their technical feasibility.

But what interactions can we observe between a SaaS model based on agile management of technical changes, and the management of DRT deployment projects?

Two parallel operations

The two parallel management modes with different challenges and deadlines can quickly lead to inconsistencies and difficulties in completing projects.

A concrete example is the integration of DRT systems into a broader MaaS (Mobility as a Service). In this context, the digitalisation of DRT must find its place in standard transportation norms and be able to integrate into broader route planning software. It then becomes necessary to standardise and norm a mode of transportation that, by definition, was extremely flexible.

The implementation of a DRT service must therefore be done by adapting to norms, or by creating new ones. Technical developments must then be based on these norms under creation to be tested. Task interdependencies are often too strong to be able to follow a precise schedule. Still in this idea, it is possible that some software becomes obsolete, even unusable just after its release, as soon as a change occurs in the MaaS or DRT market. In this case, the technical project is jeopardised.

In Canada, DRT projects usually come to fruition when they are linked to online payment tools for ticketing. A technical project to set up integrated ticketing with DRT tools was already launched at Padam Mobility to meet needs in another market, the United Kingdom. However, the expectations and needs of the Canadian market did not necessarily coincide with all planned developments. This reality tended to endanger the DRT deployment project.

In these two examples, the challenges of DRT projects or technical developments do not necessarily converge or are very interdependent. This requires finding appropriate solutions to avoid jeopardising all projects.

Resolution Suggestions

To address the difficulties mentioned earlier, there are several levers of action. They must, however, be implemented while ensuring that the integration is complete between the agile technical project and the project to provide a digital solution for DRT.

For the DRT project to be successful, such as in the case of ticketing, it is crucial to carry out a precise assessment of the new need and to focus on the ongoing technical project. The sprint or mid-sprint meeting will be ideal to present the new needs and find an approach to integrate them into the ongoing development. The project’s agility is extremely interesting in the sense that it allows the development to evolve according to the evolution of the need.

The iterations and exchanges take place according to a precise schedule combining the time constraints of both projects. The interactivity of the solution allows for meeting tight deadlines. A first version of a development takes into account the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the newly arrived customer’s need without losing sight of the final version, which remains on the roadmap for future cycles.

Let’s keep in mind that DRT projects present unpredictable and evolving constraints that induce significant temporal risks in projects.

In conclusion, in the DRT sector, the agility of technical projects and listening to customer needs are the two key elements for achieving the simultaneous success of both types of projects carried out in parallel.

This article might interest you as well: On-Demand Mobility – the evolution of local public transport

As a wish for 2022, Grégoire Bonnat, co-founder and CEO of Padam Mobility, shares some thoughts on caring (“bienveillance”) in a business context. Just like environmental impact, it has become a central theme in the professional world… without us always knowing what it really means and how it can be applied at the workplace. What about your company, how does benevolence manifest itself?

All of us care

For some time now, 100% of the candidates we interview for jobs say they are looking for a caring company.

A quick search on social networks and media interested in the professional world confirms that the “benevolence” of companies has been the subject of discussion for about two years. This is certainly a good time to bring this notion back to the forefront: the upheaval of work organisation due to Covid and the massive shift to teleworking, tensions on the job market and competition to attract talent, not to mention the theme of “caring” which is gaining ground in a media agenda filled with anxieties. All this generates the desire for everyone to find a caring company, and for companies to speak publicly about this subject.

This is the point where we are a bit confused. We don’t expect there to be a standard definition of friendliness, but still. At Padam Mobility, there are employees who don’t feel comfortable addressing a colleague or doing a round of greetings every morning. Others stand out more for their caustic humour and wacky ideas than for their “calmness” and “politeness”. And we certainly don’t ask applicants to want to be canonised one day. That said, at the end of 2018, Padam Mobility enshrined benevolence as one of its four values that guide our work and that we take into account when selecting staff. Are we missing the point?

The holy grail of the “startup spirit”

Perhaps we should start with the “why”. Indeed, the likelihood of a company behaving benevolently is low if its leaders and top management are not convinced of its value and benefits. This is also true for other values that a company wants to promote.

Creating a caring environment seems inevitable for start-ups as if it is a systematic part of their raison d’être. Yet they do not seem to be in the best position to do so. Start-ups are often gambling for survival because their market is not yet mature or because many competitors are fighting for the first – and sometimes only – place.

There is also no reason why a “mission-driven” company should automatically be more benevolent. Develop a miracle solution to reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere: If you don’t have a viable business model yet, you will have to work hard until you do; if you do, there is a 100% chance that many other competing companies will launch as well. The pressure may be even greater because, in addition to the financial commitment, you also have to save the world.

The additional exogenous pressure that young companies can feel does not make them benevolent. It gives them additional reasons to want it, because it becomes a question of survival. We are ready to face a storm if we stick together, if we know where we are sailing … and if we know that the storm will pass. For the company, investing time, brainpower and even money to bring charity to life means finding the energy to move the mountains it promised to move, while valuing its teams rather than burning them out.

What is benevolence?

Listen…

So what is benevolence? It is necessary to go beyond the vision of purely formal benevolence, which – depending on one’s preference – would directly equate to kindness, empathy or over-protection of staff. For us, it all starts with the ability to listen.

The first step is the willingness to listen, i.e. to value the teams’ well-being and their ideas. In the vast majority of cases, and apart from certain stories about toxic leaders or managers, this is not necessarily where things get stuck. All organisations know that teams that feel good are more effective, more loyal and often find the best solutions to their problems themselves.

Then you have to know how to listen. As an individual, this is something you have to learn. Not everyone has the same way of expressing themselves, and an unprepared manager can easily miss what a colleague is trying to say (or write). It is not a question of giving courses in psychology, but of training managers to be aware that some people will be more comfortable with a certain type of listening. Some quite powerful methods have been developed to train managers (at Padam Mobility we have used Processcom but it is not the only one).

Some employees may expect an empathetic ear, responding to a need for recognition of a difficulty for which there may be no immediate solution. Others will want to be sure that the manager or company has understood and recorded their problem, has the facts to describe it and will think about it when making future decisions.

As a company, listening therefore has a lot to do with training its managers, including leaders, as well as having the different channels to allow people to speak out about their difficulties in different contexts.

… and act

The journey does not end there. The manager is not a shrink who is paid to help his employees write down everything that is wrong or could be better and record it in notebooks! The company takes care of its employees by solving their problems if it can. Or by giving them the autonomy to take opportunities to make things happen themselves. Caring through listening is followed by action.

The first way is to dare to change, to be agile. It requires a lot of discipline to question things that have worked before. This is especially true for young companies that need to change, to change the scale, to solve problems that did not exist before, to realise that the working conditions for self-fulfilment are not the same with 10, 50 or 200 employees.

There is a second option for the company, which is not to change anything in the face of the expressed need. There can be fifty reasons for this, economic, logistical, contradictions with operational constraints or even with certain rules of coexistence (office life or teleworking). It can also happen that a problem should be dealt with but it is decided that other problems have priority. In this case, a company that wants to be benevolent is obliged to be transparent.

Saying to an employee “of course I understand your problem and I will solve it” is nice, but it is only nice if it is done afterwards. If not, it can lead to serious losses of trust later on. In this respect, the ability to define and communicate priorities is both one of the most important and most difficult characteristics of caring.

Concrete ways forward

There is no miracle solution, benevolence has to be worked out every day. And the answers often come from within the group.

Does someone feel unheard: is a process missing so that he or she can have more influence or, on the contrary, should a process that is too rigid be discarded? Is an organisational problem wasting some of the work further down the chain? Do employees get feedback on their work so that they can improve and feel recognised? Is there a lack of connections between certain teams or a lack of tools to facilitate communication or, on the contrary, a saturation – or slackturation 😊 – of information?

Beware of going too far and falling into the trap of a caring parent who protects his employees from all difficulties until they get bored. It is extremely rewarding to be confronted with a difficult situation and to handle it with flying colours, provided of course that the working conditions are good. Not to mention that a manager who tries to protect a colleague from difficulties can put himself in danger by overworking himself and weaken the whole organisation by obstructing the development of skills. Benevolence makes it possible to be demanding: When the machine is running well, it is so much easier to ask everyone to do their best, to solve new problems, to take on new challenges.

It is up to each company to create its own image of beneficence; its employees (and its customers!) will be the best judges of authenticity. This may result in completely different rituals.

A “caring” job interview can be a very good situation that allows both the applicant and the company to assess whether their skills match the requirements of the job. This way there are no nasty surprises later on. In another job, on the other hand, it could be an assessment that focuses on the learning and interpersonal skills of the applicant, who is a junior candidate but will subsequently be trained. In any case, it is important to be transparent about the conditions and tasks of the job in order to start with a high level of confidence.

A good meeting can be a meeting where you make sure that everyone has their say and which ends with a clear, documented decision that is shared with the rest of the team. Or a meeting that doesn’t take place because its subject can be dealt with in writing in ten times less time.

A caring annual review can be harshly objective about the facts, the results achieved, the problems encountered, and optimistic about what the future holds. And of course, the manager could spend more time listening than talking…

Our good wishes for 2022

In your company, this goodwill may take a different form, and that’s fine. Don’t try to force the use of first names on all your teams or make them read Simone Weil if that seems inappropriate. But keep your ears open. We hope that in 2022 you will read fewer blog articles about benevolence and start looking for that authentic benevolence, yours!

This article might also interest you: Retrospective: A Look back at the 21 Highlights of Padam Mobility in 2021