The Dutch Postcode Lottery
The Dutch Postcode Lottery is the largest charity lottery in the Netherlands with an average of 2.97 million participants per draw. Every month, lottery players stand a chance to win great prizes and support charitable organisations working in the fields of human rights, nature and the environment. The Dutch Postcode Lottery’s mission is to contribute to a greener and fairer world and to raise awareness for the work carried out by these organisations.
Case: The Dutch Postcode Lottery
Lennaert Kuijpers, Managing Director and responsible for all IT and development within the Lottery, approached us with his urge to nearshore 40% of its current 100+ in-house development team. Developers became relatively expensive in the Netherlands, and he’d like to expand his workload within the current budget.
The Dutch Postcode Lottery was open to do a pilot with initially 3 React developers. The team would be working on an internal UI that allowed specific configurations for the lotteries. Think of screens for drawing configurations, game round configuration, prize configurations, etc. Currently this portal was built in PHP and they would like to transfer this “one on one” to React. React will talk to REST services of their Core applications via a NodeJS layer.
Requirements
The nearshore team should be self-reliant in 1-2 months. There should be a maximum of 0.5 FTE needed to support this team by own developers.
The pilot was considered to be successful if the nearshore team:
– is self-reliant in the development, unit testing and documentation after 1-2 month
– has a minimum of support is needed (max 0.5 FTE)
– the total team workload exceeds the load of 4 FTE of our own developers
The team lead core development would like to start working all together from their office in Amsterdam, with a sprint rhythm of 3 weeks.
He would like to meet up on location once a sprint. This could be the nearshore team flying over to Amsterdam for a couple of days or some Lottery colleagues flying to the nearshore development center.
Because of this frequency, the location of the nearshore center should be within acceptable distance (max. 1 hour commute) from an airport having a direct connection to Schiphol (max flight time approx. 2.5-3 hours). Also a business hotel should be within acceptable distance from the office (preferrable walking distance).
The team lead had a preference for Portugal as a development destination. Besides that he’d like to opt for: Spain, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia. Since the Lottery is in the charity space, they didn’t want to go for countries where human rights might be questionable.
Solution
Although it didn’t happen overnight (their strict requirements narrowed down the options), we managed to find 3 partner which exactly matched their criteria. All from Portugal.
One partner – Agap2IT – stood out. Well-prepared for the call, an established organisation, active in many countries and they already knew another organisation working with Agap.
MD Portugal of Agap2IT and the team lead of the lottery got into further discussion and finally came to an agreement for the pilot. The team lead visited Agap2IT with some colleagues and started the pilot.
Fast forward to now: the pilot has been a success and extended. And Agap2IT is ready to grow the Lottery’s nearshore team(s) with additional talent.
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