Nicke Bergqvist has an entrepreneurial background and a strong willingness to succeed. His high performance and positive spirit will be a major addition to Reforce International.
Nicke first started at Ryska Posten where he was part of their big expansion in staffing and recruiting. Recently he has been working in the energy industry as a business developer and distributed innovative products in renewable energy to the Nordic market. Nicke went to College in the United States where he studied international business and psychology.
“First step in to Reforce office I knew for certain - I want to work here! I was instantly impressed by their unique Acceleration Software, big ambitions and strong commitment in everything they do, I thought- finally the perfect fit! With my experience in entrepreneurship, sales and building relationships I'm looking forward to helping our clients digitalize their goal steering and give them measurable financial results. Creating Business Agile companies prepared for any market changes” - Nicke
Reforce International are proud to have Thomas Schnittger joining Reforce International. Thomas has an entrepreneurial background and has been part of several early-stage and start-up firms. Since 2011 he has been consulting and accelerating owner-led businesses through his own firm and before that, he spent 15 years in senior sales and sales management.
I am truly excited to join ReForces mission in solving one of the largest challenges for managers worldwide. With our unique software for strategy execution, I believe we will! It is Jim Collins who says ”The enemy of the great is the good” and I will use my 20+ years of experience as CEO, entrepreneur, sales manager and board executive to support our renowned clients in finding their distinction.
If you want to know more about Reforce International or interested in becoming our new colleague. Please contact [email protected] or Apply here
Fredrik Colldahl Scherstén has a background in IT- and management consulting. His main areas of expertise include software development, project management, architecture and mentoring. Fredrik has a passion to build and improve both systems as well as organizations and its people, having a solid background in system development as well as extensive training in leadership and coaching. Having worked in different industries, with a wide range of technologies and in different positions, he is experienced and keen to constantly improve himself and his clients, his mentor adapts as well as himself, always staying on top of things.
"Building and developing are a passion of mine, probably the reason why I became an engineer. Seeing results and see something grow is amazing. But it's not only about technology - building and developing people, companies and myself are equally or even more rewarding. I am therefore very excited to join Reforce, developing the tools to help companies improve themselves seems like a perfect fit."
Fredrik has an academic background with a civil engineering / master degree in IT and a minor in “Industrial management and economics” from Chalmers university of technology. Most recently he worked as a manager at Netlight Consulting AB. Besides a background in consulting, Fredrik really enjoys the start-up industry. For instance, Fredrik has been a part of developing concepts for the start-up "Digitalpost", making letters digital and accessible.
ReExecute is a powerful tool for monitoring and facilitating strategy implementation. Even if we are proud of our product and we receive a lot of praise from our users, we are not addressing our customers’ need for mobility...until now.
Developing our mobile app has been a work in progress during the last six months at Reforce. In the beginning of the process a lot of effort were put into evaluating the different approaches/techniques of mobile app development. The different techniques can be grouped into three main groups: Native, Hybrid and Cross-platform. For our readers not familiar with these concepts, I will briefly go through them one by one.
Native
Native implies using the platform (e.g. iOS & Android) specific programming language and APIs. This requires specific expertise but allows you to leverage the full potential of the hardware and more often yields a better performance and user experience comparing to the other approaches.
Cross-platform
Cross-platform mobile development is a wide concept. In our case we have delimited the concept to include techniques that allows you to write one codebase (with minor platform specific exceptions) but to run on multiple mobile operating systems and to access a set of the hardware capabilities. One example of this technique is the React native framework that allows you to write a JavaScript codebase and in the end render platform specific UI components.
Hybrid
The distinction between hybrid and cross-platform is not always easy define. Hybrid apps are cross-platform apps with less harnessing of the platform specific APIs. Hybrid apps are almost exclusively apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript then wrapped in a native WebView (browser frame) and then packaged into an app. This approach is the least expensive one and the one where you have the most limited access to the mobile hardware.
The relevant approach for your project depends on a number of things; cost, time to market, application lifespan, application content etc. In the next few paragraphs, I will go through the aspects we considered before starting our app development and do an evaluation of our decision six months into the project.
Requirements specification
When considering which approach to use, there were a couple of requirements we had to take into consideration:
• Our resources are limited (3-4 developers also working on our main web version of ReExecute)
• The app must be able to access the hardware camera, GPS receiver and possibly other hardware capabilities (in future releases).
• No demanding graphics rendering
• Professional user experience
• Short time to market
• Support iOS and Android
Considerations
Due to our limited resources and the demand on short time to market, we first considered the hybrid approach. It was a well fit to the competencies already present in our team, we are all proficient in HTML and JavaScript. This would mean that not a lot of time would be spent on acquiring new knowledge and thus we would be able to deliver a working product within a reasonable time span. The hardware capabilities were however an issue. We argued that maybe this requirement were excessive but we came to the conclusion that a hybrid app would limit us for future improvements of the app. The hybrid approach were hence omitted from the list of candidate approaches.
Ok, we need hardware capabilities and of course a professionally looking app. Let’s go with the native approach. We actually ruled that option out as well since we deemed it too costly. The one time cost of developing the app would be affordable but we estimated the cost of maintaining two codebases too high.
After having developed PoCs based on all three approaches, our final decision was to go with a cross-platform solution, more specifically the React Native framework. Since we are only 3-4 developers total at Reforce, the cost aspect was paramount in our final decision. Using React native entailed a fairly low cost (since it’s based on a single codebase and it is mainly based on JavaScript) while at the same time allow the app to harness a vast majority of the hardware capabilities. The framework ticked all the boxes in our requirements specification except maybe one, there was a risk that the user experience would suffer due to performance issues of cross-platform techniques in general.
Evaluation
Our app project has now been running for about six months and we are days away from releasing a beta version that turned out to be a lot more extensive than we first planned for. First of all, I would like to assure everyone that our initial concern that there might be performance issues was unfounded. We had some minor performance hiccups in the beginning but React Native has matured (it is a new framework) and performance has improved (a major performance improvement was made in release 0.27 of React native). It is always important to evaluate the choices you make in order to learn for the future. So, do I think we made the right decision? Overall, yes. I think the cost would have been much less if we would have gone with a hybrid solution but the limitations would have been too significant. I am not sure whether this cross-platform solution is much more cost efficient than a native solution. React native is an immature framework and being the early-adopter always comes with a price. Having to constantly adjust to new releases (even breaking releases) is time demanding. Maybe a more stable approach would have been beneficial for us since we will not spend all of our time developing and maintaining the mobile app. Would a native approach have been too costly? Maybe, maybe not. Developing for iOS has become easier with Apple’s new praised programming language Swift and developing for Android implies writing a Java codebase (which our entire crew works with on a daily basis). Of course there would be a hurdle or two to overcome but maybe they wouldn’t have been as steep as one may think.
To summarize, I believe we have made a sound decision but due to the constant evolvement of React native we need to make sure we keep up with new releases.
Johan Wiström
Application Developer
Reforce International
After having spent more than ten years in the organizational and leadership development industry I wanted to try something new.
My name is Anders Knutsson and I have spent a considerable amount of time in the traditional HR industry, functioning both in consultancy and leadership roles. My work focus has included all areas within HR, from recruitment, individual and group development, talent-perfomance management processes to organizational development initiatives.
One of the things that has been frustrating for me working as a psychologist, trying to help organizations becoming more profitable, effective and sustainable – is how hard it is (except from recruitment decisions) to perform development work in a way that actually affects real life work behaviors. Most of the times, to me it is like we end up training football on a ping pong table.
Leaders are extracted from their normal context and the group they are supposed to lead, learning generic leadership behaviors not at all connected to their organizations strategy, competition and internal circumstances. After training is finished, we hope and expect the leaders themselves to be able to export and apply their new insights and knowledge in their work. Considering that 50% of leaders still fail, chances are that this could be made in a better way.
These are of course a problem that doesn’t have one single or obvious solution. But in my own search for answers I have been looking for a chance to work with behavior change in a more work oriented fashion. To find Reforce and understand how they designed their services was therefore a chance that I couldn’t miss. And when I finally, after a long and tough recruitment process, got accepted I was thrilled. To work, in “real life situations”, together with groups trying to accelerate their businesses strategy, is a very developing and humbling experience.
Anders Knutsson
Psychologist and Associate Partner
Reforce International
The idea that a car’s sole purpose is transportation — will seem quaint.
Under the old 19th century paradigm, an automobile was defined by the physical object you purchased on the showroom floor. And its functions were unalterable — fulfilling the same purposes until you bought your next car.
Under the 21st century paradigm — your automobile will constantly be redefined, providing you myriad services based on your needs and wants of the moment.
The recipe driving the transformation consists of this essential formula:
Platform + Apps + Service. This is delivered through a combination of:
• Hardware platform (the actual vehicle and its component parts)
• Software applications that control features and functionality of the vehicle hardware, software and services delivery; and
• Software licensing and entitlement management, which sorts out which car features, functions and services a customer has paid for and can access.
That is what CAAS is! The interesting next question is how will this impact the Automobile industry going forward, will there be the same stakeholders? What other new stakeholders will enter this space? And who will own the transaction towards the end-user?
One simple answer to these question is that nobody nows!
One thing that is very clear though is that the ownership of cars will move to owning access to transportation, we will no longer always own our car, we will be connected to a service that will ensure access to just in time transportation!
I have been working in conjunction with a large number of stakeholders within this sector for the past year, and I have seen initiatives ranging from Peer-to-Peer all the way to rental solutions like Audi:s ”SilverCar”.
I don’t believe that all this will shift overnight, but I am quite sure that it will happen much faster then we think, and that is one of the most challenging transformations of Moores Law, the industry has ever come across.
The number one question on almost all stakeholders lips is: Shall I become the spider in the CAAS net or shall I excel being a partner in other stakeholders webs?
I believe that both paths will have the opportunity to work well, but not deciding on path will most likely not.
Johan Ramel
Partner
Reforce International
Working as a developer is challenging. You are faced with hard problems that takes time and dedication to solve. To succeed you need to know what you are doing, but most of all you need to have the mindset of a programmer.
The mindset of a programmer is a very efficient approach to solve complex problems and to find small errors in big systems.
As it turns out, our way of thinking can lead to success in business as well. Just look at entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. They all have a background in computer science and have managed to solve problems at a much larger scale.
Clearly there are useful lessons to learn here. Let’s start by taking a closer look at the mindset.
Step 1 - Break it down
Every problem can be broken down to smaller pieces. The smaller the pieces are the easier it will be for you to understand them. You need to deconstruct the problem as far as you can.
When you have done that and figured out what each piece does, you have a complete overview of the problem.
Step 2 - Simplify
Now that you have your pieces you must decide which ones are relevant. You will find that many of them don’t have anything to do with the problem you are trying to solve. It’s time to simplify.
To simplify you need to study all of the pieces you created. Investigate what each one does and doesn’t do. Remove the ones that you don’t need and map out how the remaining relates to each other.
Step 3 - Pay attention to details
A developer want to know exactly what happens at every single line of code. Sometimes you will find that one line among thousand cause the problem you are trying to solve.
That’s how detailed you need to be. If you understand each line of code you will find the solution.
Step 4 - Don’t stop until it’s done
As developers we know that if we spend enough time on a problem we will eventually solve it. If we have the programmer mindset the time it takes will be much shorter.
Being consistent and patient is extremely important. You will find yourself struggling for days without making progress and then all of a sudden find exactly what you are looking for.
If we give up when we are stuck that won’t happen.
Solving strategic problems
A strategic problem may seem different but it can be solved in the same way. You can break it down, you can simplify it and you can pay attention to the details.
Maybe you already are solving strategic problems with our approach. Maybe you are as consistent as we are. But if you are not you should give it a shot.
I promise that it will save you time and that the solutions you come up with will be of higher quality.
Oscar Johansson
Partner & Application Developer
Reforce
