Infoland finds healthcare expertise and proactive IT partner in NetRom

If you work in the field of QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment) or need to comply with strict safety requirements or protocols in your daily work, you might be an end-user of Zenya. Zenya is a software suite from the Dutch software provider Infoland. Changing regulations and evolving user needs largely determine the development agenda.

Zenya is a QHSE software suite designed for quality management and risk management. The suite includes a comprehensive software package with multiple modules and solutions. The software has been around for nearly 25 years and was previously known as ‘iProva’. Its foundation lies in a document management system, with more modules and solutions added over time. These include components for document management, process workflows, monitoring and following up on actions and tasks, conducting surveys as part of audits and assessments, and risk management. The FLOW module helps organizations improve by making incident reporting and analysis simple. Zenya FLOW also supports the follow-up of reports, ensuring everyone knows at a glance what is expected from whom. The BOOST module assists in raising awareness around quality and safety, for example, through information campaigns that challenge and keep employees alert.

Renée Dzialiner, product owner at Infoland, has a background in the hospitality industry. She transitioned to a software company in 2017, where she held various roles before making a brief detour into healthcare. However, she remained drawn to the software world and joined Infoland in May 2023. As a product owner, she is closely involved in the collaboration between Infoland and its development partner NetRom. Infoland has three development teams, one of which is a hybrid team that includes IT professionals from NetRom.

“Zenya is widely used in healthcare – every hospital in the Netherlands except one uses the package,” says Dzialiner. “In addition to clients in Life Sciences & Health, Infoland also has clients in sectors like Sustainable Energy & Water and Agri & Food. Typical end-users are quality officers and QHSE professionals, but in healthcare, nurses also use Zenya ‘at the bedside,’ for example, to review a new protocol. Zenya can also be used to report medical incidents – something usually done through the electronic patient record. Medical professionals might not always realize that they are working within Zenya.”

Infoland’s clients face increasing challenges in QHSE: more regulations from regulators and managers, and higher expectations from end-users. In addition to high reliability, continuous improvement is a crucial task for Infoland. “Our challenge is to continuously align the suite as closely as possible with the changing needs of end-users. Zenya, too, is affected by a changing world: for instance, how we view methods for ensuring quality. Not only are the requirements changing, but so is the way we work. We need Zenya to be able to facilitate this.”

In addition to a high degree of configurability and flexibility, Infoland’s software must also be extremely reliable. After all, the software relieves end-users of important operational elements such as safety and quality, with increasing pressure: more regulations, more need for accountability, and more demand for assurances.

Dzialiner says, “Because the software is quite extensive, small functional changes – like adding a particular role – can have a significant impact on parts of the application. This places high demands on the developers working on the improvement and optimization of Zenya, such as enhancing the user experience and reducing the number of clicks required to get something done.”

In mid-2019, Infoland enlisted the help of NetRom due to the need for additional, flexible development capacity – something that was not easy to organize with Dutch developers at that time. “NetRom initially started with two developers as a kind of standalone team, working on specific projects with a clear beginning and end, somewhat following the waterfall method. We were quite satisfied with this, but we quickly realized that the collaboration offered much more potential than we were tapping into,” Dzialiner explains. “This led to a transition to a much closer collaboration in the form of mixed teams. Today, this mixed team has eleven people, seven of whom are at NetRom: one tester, four developers, a team coach, and a team coordinator.” In the Netherlands, Infoland’s team consists of four members: in addition to the product owner, there are two developers and a scrum master.

NetRom has helped set up a start portal for Zenya, an environment that a functional administrator can fill out and tailor to the end-users. What is visible there, and how can users quickly click through to the most requested functions? Which icons will be used? What can the customer adjust themselves, and what can’t they? NetRom also assists with the internationalization of the suite, which involves making it available in multiple languages and requires a lot of backend work.

“When we start working on new features, we take a lot of time to plan,” says Dzialiner. She explains: “With someone standing next to your desk, it’s easy to quickly discuss ideas. Working exclusively remotely makes you more results-oriented and efficient – you attend a meeting and can move on. However, it’s also important to keep seeking connection. For example, by having informal chats before the meeting. How was your weekend? What did you do? We Dutch are quite willing to share something about our private lives. That’s less common in Romania, but I find it nice to see that within our team, this is becoming more normal – colleagues want to know more about each other’s personal lives. One of the challenges is that English is not the native language for either us or the NetRom colleagues. Sometimes it takes a bit of effort to find the right words.”

“From Infoland’s side, we try to organize our collaboration around release periods – usually three to four months – focused on specific new features, products, or additions, giving them a clear theme. We work on multiple themes simultaneously, which helps us group tasks and maintain focus.”

“A significant advantage of the collaboration with NetRom is that their model always includes a team coach. This person ensures that agreements are kept,” says Dzialiner. “Think of organizing capacity, for instance, if someone needs to be replaced. Our product is large, and it takes time to get to know it, although everyone on the team also explains things on the fly. A new team member must also know how the work is done. NetRom handles all of this in the background.”

“To enhance understanding, we also prepare stories together. In such a call, their QA professionals, who later test the delivered product, also join in. Involving these people beforehand increases their understanding and insight into the application, making testing easier. NetRom works a lot for independent software vendors, and you can tell.”

“Our method includes a retrospective every two weeks. The NetRom team members also gather input from their colleagues working on other projects, bringing in knowledge that can be useful for our projects. Conversely, we involve Infoland developers from our other teams in NetRom’s work. Sometimes we refer our NetRom colleagues to someone from another team because that’s where the answer to a question lies. Engineers and architects just contact each other directly, and that works very smoothly,” says Dzialiner.

In Dzialiner’s view, the biggest advantage of NetRom is the flexibility they offer. While we don’t need to scale up and down much, the NetRom team also provides us with flexibility in how we handle the rituals we use, both within the team and in the entire product development team at Infoland.”

Since the NetRom colleagues have now built up considerable domain knowledge (“One of the software engineers has been working for Infoland for five years and knows more about the product than I do,” says Dzialiner), it’s no longer just a matter of ‘getting code written’. In addition to adding development capacity to the mixed team, the NetRom team members are also important sparring partners. “If I have a question – like where to find more information about a specific feature – I usually look it up myself first. But if I can’t figure it out, I just call them. In short, when I listen to my Infoland colleagues, my impression is that we’ve made significant progress recently and that there’s a good form of collaboration. If we have a lunch for the department here, we try to arrange something for the NetRom side as well. There’s a positive dynamic, and we’re very happy with that.”

Looking for reliable software development services?
See how we can help.