Technology consultancy and IT department for Grupo ZAG: fifteen parallel fronts

Grupo ZAG is a real estate developer with several brands and a payment plan sales model. Its business depends on systems that have to talk to each other: collections, sales, construction, service and acquisition.

A company that tackles its technology project by project ends up with a collection of systems that work alone and not together, and with a vendor it cannot separate from.

What was needed was not a build but an installed capability.

• No area of its own: there was no internal structure holding the whole together or deciding over it.
• Simultaneous fronts: collections, CRM, portal, apps, construction, reconciliation and acquisition advanced at once and needed a shared criterion.
• Dependency risk: every undocumented new system ties the client further to whoever built it.

The cost of not solving it is a growing company whose technology becomes harder to change every year.

We supported the construction of the group's entire technology capability and organized it as a department, with owners, repositories and periodic closes.

Documentation was not a final deliverable but a practice: every system was left with a functional document, a technical document and a procedure the internal team can run.

The area, before the projects

• Formation of an IT department with assigned owners.
• Administration of the code repositories of every build.
• Periodic administrative and documentary closes consolidating the state of each front.
• Every initiative started with an assessment report defining scope and stages before any code.

Fifteen fronts in parallel

• The core plan system with multichannel collections, the omnichannel CRM, the self service portal and the mobile apps.
• Construction management and tracking, bank reconciliation, interest schemes, electronic signature and unit allocation.
• Loyalty, crowdfunding, ecommerce, email marketing and access control portal.
• Data infrastructure for one of the offices, and search acquisition in organic and paid.

A criterion that avoids an archipelago

• Systems integrate through the core business APIs.
• The portal, the CRM and the apps consume the same source of truth instead of keeping parallel data.

Architecture and technology

• IT department with its own repositories and per system documentation.
• Core business APIs as the shared integration layer.

Learn more about software development.

The group ended up with a technology area of its own, which is the hardest result to sustain in a consultancy.

Starting point

• No technology area or structure holding the whole together.
• Initiatives tackled project by project, with no shared integration criterion.

Strategic impact

• Fifteen technology fronts built and running, integrated through the core APIs.
• Every system with a functional document, a technical document and a runnable procedure.
• Repositories and closes managed as practice rather than as exception.
• The client was left with its own structure instead of a dependency.
• Systems talk to each other, so adding one does not mean replicating data that already exists.