Engage Squared - It’s all Japanese to me

Imagine being an English-speaking software developer tasked with creating an app completely in Japanese, while living in New Zealand.

That’s exactly the situation Engage Squared developer Ryan Clasby found himself in. Ryan had to create the app from scratch in a foreign language, communicate with his team in another hemisphere and time zone, work with translations along the way and design an app in a completely new format to meet the Japanese customer requirements.

Two months after the project started, Ryan and his close team boasted a custom app for the client, completely in Japanese. So successful was the app, the client who commissioned the app on behalf of a larger client, also asked for its own custom version.

A screenshot of the app created by Engage Squared for the Japanese client.

“It was certainly a challenge,” Ryan said.

Despite being an experienced Power Platform developer, Ryan was nervous.

“When I was first told about it, I thought; ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this. It’s going to be pretty difficult’,” he said.

Ryan Clasby, Senior Developer, Engage Squared.

“It felt a bit daunting, but I really liked the idea of the challenge. It’s something I’ve never done before, creating an app in a different language.”

Ryan and his team were able to successfully complete the project by communicating and collaborating on Microsoft Teams and across the M365 suite of tools. Not only was their app successful, so was their team.

In SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams benchmarking analysis of more than 67,000 teams in Microsoft Teams, this team was ranked No.2 in world, based on SWOOP’s comprehensive bespoke online Team Performance Index.

This quiet achieving team’s high ranking came as a surprise to Engage Squared CEO Stephen Monk, who didn’t even have access to the team on Teams.

But a close look at the team shows best practices in working out loud and digital collaboration habits right from the start.

Let’s backtrack to September 2022 when Engage Squared expanded into Japan and opened its first office in Tokyo.

CEO Stephen Monk, Michael Cashen and Justin McPhee at Engage Squared’s Tokyo office launch in September 2022.

In December 2022 a consulting firm contacted Michael Cashen, Engage Squared’s Japan Country Manager, about creating an employee development and wellbeing app on Microsoft Power Platform for a training firm that was working with a large pharmaceutical company, the end client.

Some of Engage Squared’s Tokyo-based team, including Yuta and Michael.

Tokyo-based project manager Yuta Saito was the main contact point and while he had some experience building Power Platform apps, it was decided the more experienced Ryan would primarily develop the app. Michael, Yuta and Ryan set up a team on Microsoft Teams for the project, and Ryan’s manager was also invited into the team.

Michael Cashen, Japan Country Manager, Engage Squared.

Three channels were created – a rarely-used General channel, a channel for the app for the pharmaceutical company and a third channel for the app for the training firm that also wanted its bespoke version. All documents, chats and communications were posted in the Teams channel and twice a week the three met online in a Teams meeting for 30-minute check-ins.

Yuta Saito, Project Manager, Engage Squared.

They were working across two time zones in different hemispheres so transparent collaboration allowed for asynchronous working habits. Working this way meant the team excelled in SWOOP Analytics’ Collaboration Habits of being Email Liberated, Chat Liberated, Asynchronous Collaborators, Filer Sharers, Camera Confident and Screen Sharers.

Working this way in Microsoft Teams channels also allowed easy access to auto translations, which were sometimes needed.

Stephen Monk, CEO, Engage Squared.

User requirements, user stories, bugs discovered – everything was documented and discussed in the Teams channel, along with deadline dates, prioritisation of work and more.

“Apart from our bi-weekly check-ins, everything went back and forth on posts in the channels,” Michael said.

“Ryan doesn’t speak Japanese and he built the app with the UI completely in Japanese. It was quite impressive.”

The final app was finished in February and deployed in March. The team no longer uses the Microsoft Teams channel but the entire process remains documented there for anyone to tap into the knowledge should it be required. The team has not been archived but Michael has unpinned the team, making it accessible but out of sight, now it’s not required on a daily basis.

“Adopting great work habits has helped us in many ways,” said CEO Stephen Monk.

“Because of how we work, we can have confidence to put the best person with the right skills on the job, regardless of where they are based. This leads to better outcomes for customers and quicker turnaround times and helps our team to share knowledge and continuously improve.

“It’s great to see how these collaborating practices have real tangible benefits.”

Practicing what it preaches when it comes to successful digital collaboration, Engage Squared boasted a second team in the top 10 from the more than 67,000 benchmarked by SWOOP in 2023. The No.9 ranked team in SWOOP’s global benchmarking is a team established for an internal project to replace Engage Squared’s time sheet system.