HOME
Careers
Offer
   Contact us    Resources to download    Our job opportunities in France   
AViSTO's Technical Department

The Rise of AViSTO’s Technical Department

For about three years, a reflection has been underway intending to expand the missions of AViSTO’s technical department. The Covid has acted as an accelerator and over the past six months, the organization and functioning of the team have changed deeply. It was a good moment to make a progress report with Pierre Pacchioni, the co-founder and technical director of AViSTO, and to present to you all the changes put in place as well as those to come.

Before

Traditionally, the AViSTO offer had 2 parts, technical assistance, and turnkey projects. Pierre took care of the turnkey project axis with a very broad role. Indeed, he supported the business managers in the context of responses to calls for tenders, he would then often manage the projects themselves, or support the project managers.

Over the years, under the impetus of many customers who wanted more flexibility, the dedicated development center offer appeared and then grew significantly. The technical department was naturally involved in strategic projects, and a reflection was in progress on the redefinition of its missions and its organization.

 

The impact of Covid

Covid has acted as an accelerator at two levels.

First of all, the geographical proximity of the teams is often no longer a decisive criterion for our customers, both for the establishment of dedicated development centers and the realization of turnkey projects. The need to structure and further standardize the operating modes of our various AViSTO locations had become essential.

Then, the demand for turnkey projects experienced strong growth. How to meet this demand, in addition to the growing involvement in dedicated development centers?

It was time for a paradigm shift for the technical department of AViSTO.

 

The redefinition of our services offering

In parallel with these reflections, the service offer of the ADVANS Group companies has been redefined and formalized.

We now propose four offers from CL1 to CL4 (CL for Commitment Level); the higher the number, the more important the level of commitment is for us:

  • CL1 is the old “technical assistance”, the customer is responsible for the projects and their management.
  • CL2 is the skills center, where resources are managed by our technical managers.
  • CL3 is the service center, where we are responsible for project delivery and meeting Quality/Cost/Deadline goals.
  • CL4 is the old “turnkey projects”.

 

Our strategy is to reduce the importance of CL1 and get more CL2, CL3 & CL4 projects instead.

As a reminder, for CL1 and CL2, our commitment is limited to means, while for CL3 and CL4, we commit to results.

To implement this strategy, here is the new technical organization that has been put in place.

 

The new organization of the technical department

A three-partite organization has been defined under the leadership of Christophe Parmentier, the operational director of AViSTO:

  • Pierre now focuses on pre-sales, which includes the analysis of requests, architecture, response to calls for tenders, and meeting customers along with business managers.
  • Thibault Mehrenberger, after 6 years of project management at AViSTO, took the overall responsibility for the delivery aspect. Once the projects have been won, he ensures their successful completion in conjunction with the project managers responsible for CL3 and CL4.
  • Finally, Julien Errera, in charge of major projects for fifteen years at ELSYS Design and then AViSTO, is in charge of the exploitation/DevOps part. This is a cross-functional role intended to rationalize and standardize our practices in the development, deployment, and operation phases.

 

Prospects

Implemented at the end of 2021, this transformation has accelerated significantly since the start of the year. It pursues several objectives.

First of all, we want to increase the number of projects won and take on ever more ambitious challenges.

Next, we want to streamline the management of our CL4s by implementing a set of common documents, tools, and methods intended to promote capitalization, improve our delivery and our profitability.

Finally, we want to introduce a form of “industrialization” of our operating methods, with for example the generalization of the Dev(Sec)Ops and Quality Assurance focus for all our projects.

 

As a consequence, we expect better capitalization of knowledge, an increased synergy between development centers, and new management positions within increasingly empowered project teams.

This transition is already well advanced for the project managers, with whom Pierre, Thibault, and Julien discuss at least once a week. And although this change was initiated in Vallauris, it concerns all development centers; moreover, the project managers from Aix and Paris were included from the beginning in the bi-weekly meetings.

We are now considering strengthening the technical structure with the establishment of technical managers, as we find at ELSYS Design.

 

Thus, we believe we have laid the foundations of a truly virtuous circle; we now want to go on progressing in this direction in the months and years to come.