Glitni | Summary of the Second Half of 2023

We have had an eventful second half of 2023, with highs, lows and some nail-biting along the way. The year ended well, and we are developing as a company. Here is a quick summary of what we have accomplished. As honest as we can manage, in retro format.

Highlights

We accomplished a lot in the second half of 2023. Here are our highlights:

• There were several wins on sales towards the end of the year, which meant our market uncertainty suddenly became very small. We have secured staffing through the spring, and have confidence through several large clients and now 3 out of 7 consultants in public sector projects.
• Our efforts in visibility and marketing generated several incoming enquiries, particularly related to establishing new data platforms.
• We got Monica and Knut Arne as new employees, while Eystein decided that a permanent position suited him better given his family logistics. Right after crossing into 2024, we recruited yet another one - and now we are 8! We are ready to recruit more!

Sales and projects - Solid clients - with a better mix of private and public sector organisations

Sales and projects | Roles we have taken

At our clients, we have served as:

• project manager for the implementation of a new data platform
• data platform developers and architects
• data engineer
• data architect
• advisor on data strategy
• project manager/advisor on master data and data governance

Sales and projects | What we accomplished

• We have solid and exciting organisations as clients, and our client portfolio holds up well against the clients of the large consulting firms. We continued in retail with 3 clients, started working for an IT company, an insurance company, a course provider and an industrial company, and got our second public sector engagement - at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.
• We succeeded in sales! We experienced significant uncertainty regarding the volume of assignments looking ahead for a period, in line with the consulting industry at large. However, we made ourselves visible across many channels, and also initiated collaborations with other larger players. There were actually several wins on sales towards the end of the year, which meant our market uncertainty suddenly became very small. We have now secured staffing through the spring. We have confidence through even more large clients - and that 3 out of 7 consultants are now in public sector projects.
• We started our first project on Fabric, where there is a lot that works well today, but where other capabilities need to mature further. Time and again, our consultants prove that they are curious and fearless people who are quick to learn new methods, architectures and technologies!

Sales and projects | Where we can improve

• We experienced lower hourly rates, in a market where assignments generally became fewer. We have the best people, and are starting to accumulate significant experience that allows us to deliver value quickly. We need to work on making the value more visible, quite simply.
• It still takes some effort to become fully aligned, when there are several of us who have not worked together before. We have become better at leveraging our collective competence pool compared to the first half, both through Slack and shared office days where we are together across projects.
• Sales requires constant effort, and we have improved compared to the first half. There is still room for improvement. The client portfolio should now be strong enough that the most important thing is to deliver well where we already are - so that we become candidates for new assignments.

Recruitment - We are now 8 employees!

We are extremely focused on getting the right people on board. And then we also need to work on how we take care of each other along the way.

Recruitment | What we accomplished

• Recruitment went very well before the summer, and Monica and Knut Arne went straight into projects during the autumn. We did not start additional recruitment processes in the second half, partly because we wanted to spend the time giving Monica and Knut Arne a good start, but also because we saw that the market situation was more uncertain for a period.
• In January 2024, we brought in yet another consultant! This is strictly speaking incorrect periodisation, as they say in accounting parlance. He will start during the spring of 2024, initially in a data engineer role. We are excited - now we are 8!
• We are using subcontractors even more actively than before. The architects Oyvind Remme and Tobias Flood worked with us on projects during the autumn and winter, and we also had joint projects with Sprint Consulting.
• We are also subcontractors to others. We delivered together with Sprint, Noria, Knowit, Norway Consulting and Atea throughout the half-year. There are many advantages to joining forces, especially for clients where framework agreements and such are important.

Recruitment | Where we can improve

• We gained and lost the same person. Eystein Kleivenes chose to leave us after the probation period, as he concluded that the consultant role no longer suits him as well - with 4 children and living in the countryside in Asker. All parties found it sad, because we truly enjoyed working together professionally and socially! Let us hope we get to work together anyway, Eystein.
• Our growth plan does not sufficiently account for the possibility of losing people. Even though we believe we do a good job of finding the right people, other things in life can happen that make the role less suitable. We probably need to think even more about how we can create assignments and roles where we can retain people in different life situations for a long time, even though we already emphasise this. We also need to spend more time on this during the interview process, we think.

Internal life - Glitni is a social professional community

Internal life | What we accomplished

• We are a professional community, with truly engaged people. We have managed to work together in virtually all assignments, though not always in 100% roles. We make good use of each other, but can still improve.
• We found a better format for our internal days. We need to work together on our structural capital, and develop competence together around new concepts, architecture and technology. We became a bit better at defining what we want to get out of the time, and found a format that worked better in the second half than earlier in Glitni’s history.
• We had a great social calendar. We went on a cabin trip, went out to eat (were supposed to go to a quiz, but dinner was too enjoyable), and had our Christmas party at one of our homes. We continued to have many pleasant breakfasts at the city’s finest venues. Thon Hotel Rosenkranz, Sommero, Amerikalinjen and Bristol are all excellent in their own way, in case you were wondering!

Internal life | Where we can improve

• Attendance at our office at SPACES varies somewhat. We are all in projects, and the meeting calendar is not always easily compatible with an office where we sit together - and the phone rooms are small and uncomfortable over time. We will see how we can solve this through fewer meetings and/or better meeting room options.
• We are underway with the collaboration with Sprint Consulting. As a data-focused team, we hope to get closer to business problems - and Sprint can deliver even greater value through us with more data competence. We can still improve - the projects are not yet cross-disciplinary enough, and there is potential to deliver much more together. For starters, we simply need to sell more projects together.
• We still have not landed the Microsoft partnership, as we have not chosen to prioritise the required certifications yet (Azure service partner).

Visibility - We are beginning to reap the rewards

Visibility | What we accomplished

• We have co-organised Oslo dbt Meetup numbers 3 and 4 together with Computas in August and November. At both Meetups, around 70-80 engaged participants attended. We are ready for Meetups 5 and 6!
• We continue to see returns on our visibility efforts through leads. We continued to be fairly active on LinkedIn and Glitni.no. We continued to receive enquiries by phone and email from potential clients who wanted to talk with us, and landed several projects this way.

Visibility | Where we can improve

• Working on visibility takes time, and we have had to prioritise more ruthlessly. We have established a decent rhythm for content production on LinkedIn and our own website, but with a significantly lower effort than before. This does take time. Fortunately, we are starting to build up a body of content that holds up well over time and gives a good picture of what we care about as a company. Going forward, we should increase the frequency somewhat again, both on the article front and on LinkedIn. We can see the effects directly in our project pipeline.

Curious?

If this piqued your curiosity, feel free to get in touch with us or follow us on LinkedIn!