In the last few years, business has become more dynamic than in earlier times. This is particularly true in highly technical pursuits like software engineering, where the widespread adoption of Agile methodologies means that a team’s ability to make swift, educated decisions on project execution is a must.
But the old paradigms of whiteboards and sticky notes to support and manage key strategic decisions have not kept up. This was obvious in 2012 to Jeremy Lu and Brad Ward (Co-founders).
Their response was to form the company and launch a suite of products aimed squarely at providing tools for high-performance teams to manage group decision-making, organise thoughts and drive group consensus. And it seems their vision was a shared one. The initial GroupMap application was immediately seen as an invaluable tool by forward-thinking customers and was voted as a finalist in the OzApps, iAwards, and the Western Australian Information Technology and Telecommunications Alliance awards.
GroupMap helps facilitate team decision-making and improved meetings with organizations around the world (including Mitrais). Jeremy explained, “GroupMap creates tools for Facilitators, Scrum Masters, Team Leaders, and consultants to improve the effectiveness and engagement in meetings with a guided facilitation tool and customizable templates where ideas can be shared, prioritized, and actions created.”
But it didn’t stop there. Based on usage data, there was a growing trend of Agile development projects and Scrum Masters who wanted to run retrospectives. From this, further innovation was undertaken to create another product.
TeamRetro is designed specifically for teams who want to run fun, effective, engaging, and worthwhile agile retrospectives. It also lets you run health checks with the team and provides real-time dashboards that allow you to track meeting cadence, team health, and action status across all teams over a period of time. It’s been used by organizations globally across all verticals to support their own software product goals, human resource development, and even marketing efforts.
It was vital to Jeremy and Brad that momentum be maintained – a pipeline of enhancements is still coming. As Jeremy explained, “Our customers are the key drivers of our product direction, and it’s because of them we have clarity over what we are doing in order to help them be more effective in the work that they do.” They reached out to Mitrais to augment their development team to deepen integrations, improve system capability and provide additional capacity to allow GroupMap to meet its goals.
Like Mitrais, GroupMap is interested in more than just a transactional relationship. As Jeremy says, “We chose to work with Mitrais because of their value for money and service capability as well as being able to create strong partnerships. We look forward to seeing how Mitrais can benefit from the use of TeamRetro, and it’s been great to see the commitment, passion, and interest from the Mitrais team members, who feel like they are part of the fabric of the team”.
That passion is evident, as the Mitrais team members quickly recognized the benefits GroupMap’s suite could yield for Mitrais’s 500+ developers. So positive was their response that Mitrais is now trialing GroupMap’s application suite internally to potentially offer it to other clients for use in their projects.
It is a pleasure for Mitrais to be involved with GroupMap in developing such innovative tools, and we hope to establish a long-term, high-trust relationship that helps Jeremy, Brad, and the GroupMap team achieve their goals.
