For more than two years Blue Soft has been supporting TUIthe world's number 1 travel company. Our consultants and developers have contributed to a vast transformation of the information system. With Danny Houée, Head of Software Delivery, we take a look back at this adventure and the ingredients of our successful collaboration.

Major structuring projects and crisis Covid: dVariable volume needs at Tui

Can you present your role and the organization of your team?

Danny Houée explains: "I am responsible for IT software delivery"which means that my role is to provide the company with technological tools that facilitate the work of all employees and enable better performance at all levels. I manage a team of 30 developers and Scrum Masters, and we call on specialized external skills to support our developments and the needs of the TUI France business.

Since I took this position, I have been working with Blue Soft, who has been able to respond with reactivity and relevance to our needs, by presenting us with perfectly adapted profiles with relevant TJM.

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As in all technical teams, the fact of calling upon external services allows us to adapt very quickly to the evolution of the company's needs. In the case of TUIwe have In the case of TUI, we have experienced significant upward fluctuations, particularly during the transformation of our IT system. It was becoming It became urgent to develop our information system so that the applications of the French subsidiary could integrate the volume and functional specificities of the Belgian and Dutch subsidiaries of TUI. This project of consolidation and IT synergy of the subsidiaries of 3 countries was carried out jointly by the IT teams of the France / Belgium / Netherlands zone. We then needed specialized skills, but also people capable ofWe needed specialized skills, but also people capable of integrating an existing team and adopting our mindset.

On the other hand, since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis we have been very heavily impacted on our activity, like all tour operators. And the recovery is very gradual. We have reviewed the pace and volume of our projects, but we cannot stop everything! The flexibility provided by an external service provider is particularly useful in these situations. With its culture of agility, Blue Soft knows how to respond to these variations and propose interesting alternatives. "

You can also read our 5 tips on Risk Management in times of health crisis.

A requirement of technical quality to which Blue Soft knows how to respond

Let's go back to Tui's IS transformation. This is usually the type of project that requires very specific and often scarce resources. How did you build your team?

"Two years ago, the Group set very high standards. We technical tests, which generate a fairly drastic selection process.. The ratio of tests to recruitment is around 5%.. But beyond technical skills, a real paradigm shift was required. We adopted agility as a response to our need for continuous improvement continuous improvement and individual empowerment." Interested? Browse the things to remember through the State Of Agile 2023 survey. "It starts with recruitment. It's up to the team to select the best future employee. Lhe candidates undergo technical tests with developers already in place. They meet their peers and know right away who they'll be working with and that the standards are very high.

Quality is more important than speed Delivery. It is present at every levelx of the team: management , product owners, scrum masters and developers are all heavily involved.. The user stories are with a high level of detail, and the highly standardized agilerituals are respected.

If we are so rigorous, it is also to cultivate a culture of clean code and refactoring of our Legacy necessary to the transformation of our information system. Ne needed to manage the increase in workloads, the different specificities of each country and the need for business continuity, with a context of complexity development and d'quality requirements. At Blue Soft, we have found profiles that fit well with a "mindset of continuous improvement necessary to our success. In a multi-million euro project, this is not an accessory.

The future belongs to DevOps for Tui

devops tools guide

Now that agility has proven its effectiveness within the group, what are your next challenges?

"The future is DevOps. This is in line withour agile approach, and we have all the ingredients for success. We use Microsoft Azure's Cloud services. And each Sprint enables us to increase the coverage of testable code, thereby increase our continuous deployment capabilities with Azure DevOps Service. Culturally, our team is ready, but technically we'll no doubt be calling on Blue Soft  again!" concludes Danny Houée.

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