REX - My QIMA Onboarding

Today we want to share with you how, as a newcomer, you will be onboarded in our QIMAone team. We are growing a lot, and it’s not finished. To ease this very important first step in your new job, we have a whole documented and tracked process.

In our internal wiki, we have a dedicated page to describe every attention point, and a Jira template will all the sub-task to onboard a newcomer. This process is improved with iteration after each feedback.

It lists the required service accounts and presentations with their respective contacts, how-tos. The first few weeks, you will have the same onboarding overview and a personalized presentation regarding your curiosity and affinity. The goal is to ensure the quality of your integration, whoever is in charge. Even with everything written down and tracked, a newcomer is not left on its own and all tours are done individually or in small group.

We can split our onboarding process at several times.

The preparation

Prior to your arrival, your manager orders your computer with your OS of choice (Windows, Linux, macOS) and creates your Office 365 account. At last, he asks which team and who can be in charge of your onboarding. And a buddy was also dedicated to you to take care of you in a more long term.

Your first day

If you live near to Lille, your first day will be at the office, your computer is waiting to you if you don’t already take it before, because you can ! And your account was already created. A dedicated colleague will take care of you and help you discover our QIMAone platform. This is what I call : a warm welcome.

This welcome and the fact that each meeting start on time was my first surprise.

About meeting, the first one has a dedicated flavour. Each morning (French time) we start with a daily meeting, and an overall meeting called Daily sync. It lets us share information or requirement between teams. And for your first day, it’s the opportunity to present you and discover our worldwide team !

For me, it was my first woah effect. My team fellows are in China, Malaysia, India and France. That’s exactly the spirit that I wanted to discover when I am joined QIMA. An international company with a great ambition and some team players around the world working together.

After the presentation and a little beverage, we start some presentation of our platform. More or less technical, depends on your affinity.

Your first week

At the beginning, you will have some meetings with different teams to understand our business, our organization and with time, how we apply our values.

We use our Jira task here (and only here) to ensure that in few weeks you discover all team which contribute to the QIMAone platform. We name it : "Tour". For each presentation, someone from the team will explain to you their role and what they do.

• Agile Tour : a scrum master will explain you our organization. We use SCRUM and go to the LESS framework.
• PM Tour : a product manager (a product owner in Agile vocabulary) will show you our platform
• Backend Tour : to discovers the backend architecture and how we organize our code base
• Front End Tour : to discovering our front architecture and how we work with it
• UX Tour : to understand how our designer work to make our customer experience better
• QA Tour : to know how we check our quality gates
• Data Tour : to discover how our data scientist understand our data to add more values to our product.
• Techops Tour : to meet our infrastructure and how we orchestrate our platform
• CSM (Customer Success Manager) Tour : to meet our customers ! And their dedicated people who take care of them

For my point of view, it was a good time to discuss with a lot of passionate colleagues and discovering how we build QIMAone. My second woah effect was with the CSM Tour. Assist to a customer presentation, discuss and understand the customer needs. As a developer, it’s a great time to see how some lines of codes can help people in their daily job. And what we can still do.

Around all of that, you can start working with a peer who support you to build QIMAone together.

And finally, in your first week you will prepare with your manager a welcome email to present you to the company with some lines about your career and a personal note. This mail lets everyone know your venue and discovering maybe a passion, interest or experience in common. It’s help to break the ice at coffee time and start some fun discussion.

Your first month

Don’t be afraid, all the Tours are prioritized with respect to your job and dispatched over time. For example, the PM Tour must be done soon to understand what we do. And as a developer you will continue with the Backend, Front-end and Agile Tour for sure.

We also have some e-learning sessions to help you discover our business and values.

Every week, you have a one-on-one meeting with your manager to ensure that all is fine. You also share a lunch with your buddy to take time to know each other. And you could discuss with our CTO around a coffee, of course, but also in a dedicated meeting to learn who you are and present you our vision and our strategies.

We also have a special QIMA experience : the shadow inspection. To let you understand our main job, the best experience could be : do it ! You will have the opportunity to join an inspector and assist him on an inspection. Do you know that during the pandemic, QIMA was requested to inspect a lot of masks ?

Finally, to close your onboarding, you will have a meeting with our human resource to ensure that you are fine, that you can work in the best environment and remind you their availability if needed.

On my side, I “closed the loop” by being in charge of a newcomer onboarding. Did I say that we are growing ?!

My personal feedback after few months

I already share with you some feelings, but I want to highlight some others.

The care of my colleagues. Since the beginning, I feel like if each co-worker ensure that I can work in good condition, that I feel good and understood our organization. It is really pleasant.

The proximity with my manager and our CTO. In fact, with anyone at QIMAone. We take the time to know each other, to understand our role and what we can do to work better.

Something that I can call : "the running train". We work a lot and have tons of things to do. We apply the agile philosophy with, from my point of view, a great efficiency. That’s amazing to see our organization deliver each week more features in production to our customers. It’s a thrilling experience.

Working with time zone. It can be hard sometime to have a few hours to share with a co-worker what you have done and where we are in the plan. But also awesome to start your day and see the work your colleague did when you are sleeping. But globally, with our daily sync, our documentation and how we are organized. I think we use this difficulty to improve our work and do it better. And of course, discovering other cultures, habits and landscape is exciting.

This is what I want to share with you today. Thanks for your attention. I hope you learn some tips about how a good onboarding could be. Or just give you the interest to meet us. Because, in case you miss it : we are hiring ! 😁

Matthieu Fernandes - developer at QIMA