How EPAM Worked Closely with Burberry to Embrace Remote Work

The Future of Remote: How We Worked Closely at a Distance with Burberry

EPAM has extensive experience bringing people together globally, having spent over 25 years honing optimal distributed and remote working practices.

When new market realities arose in 2020, we made a seamless transition to a completely remote setup, allowing us to continue to add value and hit all our deadlines and targets. The trust and collaboration that underpin EPAM’s successful, globally distributed business model have become more important than ever. The lessons we have learned from contemporary market conditions allow us to create new and better ways of working and to provide superior service to our clients.

With Burberry we already had a successful distributed model of work, but in March we had to quickly pivot to a fully remote model to fit the Burberry-EPAM team. Our partnership over the past several months demonstrates the effectiveness of our practices, as we maintained and created close connections while at a distance.

Now we’re having conversations around what remote working could look like well into the future, and our recent success has inspired us to share our story.

Our History With Burberry

Burberry is a global luxury brand with offices around the world. Since 2014, Burberry has collaborated with EPAM on a number of innovative projects, from building eCommerce platforms to developing big data initiatives. EPAM has become a strategic technology partner, working hand-in-hand with Burberry to realize its goals.

In recent years, EPAM and Burberry have worked closely together to enhance Burberry’s digital real estate. We moved the company to a headless eCommerce system, including a MACH ecosystem. MACH architecture (microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless) is a modular approach to technology architecture that offers flexibility for companies to better meet their customers’ needs.

Embracing the New Norm:
Seamlessly Moving Remote

In the new world of remote work, operating with minimal interruptions became business-critical. Although the EPAM-Burberry team was already distributed across seven offices and two continents, 2020 required the transition to full remote, adding another layer of complexity to our model.

Large parts of Burberry’s technology team were able to make the transition to remote working quickly and securely, buoyed by their previous experience of working with EPAM through a distributed team model. Our collective one-team philosophy made for a smooth and successful transition as offices had to temporarily close. EPAM and Burberry were able to transition our teams of about 350 people effectively within a matter of days to the new remote working environment, with improvements in collaboration and delivery velocity.

Since we moved to this remote working model, the proof really has been in the execution. Over the last six months, we’ve successfully completed a phased rollout of Burberry’s new DAM (digital asset management) product, which was released while working remotely and has since shown high user adoption rates.

Remote working for an extended period of time presented a new and improved way of collaborating, enhancing relationships across teams and forging deeper connections. As a result of this, both Burberry and EPAM were able to continue software engineering work without delaying important projects and technology upgrades.

What the Future Holds

The quick transition to a completely remote setup, and the ease with which we adapted to this new model, inspired us to see how we could leverage this way of working over the long term. We decided to use this challenge as an opportunity to share our experience with more companies like Burberry.

EXAMPLES OF HOW WE ADAPTED OUR REMOTE WORKING MODEL WITHIN THE BURBERRY-EPAM TEAM INCLUDE:

Introducing internal EPAM virtual ‘water cooler’ chats.

Moving informal conversations online meant they became a lot more inclusive, providing a platform for people from multiple global locations, across EPAM and Burberry, to join in and connect with each other. This also reduced the time needed to set up separate formal communications channels.

Establishing methods that enabled closer internal cross-team collaborations, from product managers to engineering teams.

Being able to see the bigger picture improved the understanding of business objectives and our ability to deliver immediate value to Burberry.

Streamlining and enhancing internal digital communications.

With our whole team working remotely, we ensured that all our employees were positioned to be as efficient as possible wherever they were.

Leveraging EPAM’s leading workforce and delivery management toolset, TelescopeAI.

Our integrated toolset supports team resourcing and project reporting through data-driven insights, time reporting and delivery analytics to ensure we are operating in the most optimized and efficient way.

Integrating Burberry and EPAM communications strategies, including regular shared ‘town hall’ events.

These ensure that teams are closely aligned to the business objectives that their solutions enable, providing a holistic view of the overall delivery.