‘Flexible hours, engaging tasks, free pizza’ make Improving — Houston No. 1 on the list
The entryway of Improving — Houston proudly displays a pool table earned last September after the Houston office surpassed $7 million in revenues. New felt was installed just four months later due to heavy use by its celebratory, now pool shark employees.
This year, the team is working toward $20 million in revenues to upgrade its two-tap beer dispenser to five taps — a goal the software development and consulting firm might achieve by December, thanks to an increase in business from oil and gas companies, retailers seeking to meet consumers’ tech-savvy demands and other firms using big data and machine learning.
“We’ve grown hugely and have hired a lot of people,” said Devlin Liles, president of Improving — Houston. “But that’s also something we didn’t want to do if we couldn’t maintain our culture. That piece of it has been more difficult than I would have imagined, but also more fulfilling.”
The company has maintained its culture by adding new leadership training programs, encouraging employees to follow and share their interests and hosting a variety of team-building activities, such as the annual Las Vegas retreat.
This ability to grow, adding 36 employees in the past year and planning to significantly increase its headcount in the next 12 months, while maintaining a fun, encouraging work culture helped Improving — Houston rank No. 1 among small companies on this year’s Top Workplaces list.
Free pizza
“Improving has created an amazing culture designed to help us be our best selves, learn and grow,” one employee said in the Top Workplaces survey. “Improving has a great and diverse community of really smart people who are all there to make money, have fun and help each other.”
Another employee put it more succinctly: “Flexible hours, engaging tasks, free pizza.”
Improving, headquartered in Plano, was founded in 2007 and opened its Houston office in 2011. It has 10 offices in the United States and Canada.
The company builds custom software for clients, ranging from mobile apps and big data analytics to ecommerce websites and theme park ticketing systems. It also provides consulting services, which includes teaching companies the Agile methodology for tackling complex projects with faster, more flexible work processes.
It’s essentially taking employees with different disciplines and combining them on one team, Liles said.
For instance, an oil and gas company might perform a well analysis by having different teams of geophysicists, geologists, drill engineers and financial analysts look at the well and create separate reports. The Agile approach would combine a geophysicist, geologist, drill engineer and financial analyst into one team.
Sold out
Liles said these Agile principles have been prevalent in the software industry for many years, recently expanding to other sectors. Improving — Houston hosted an Agile thought leader’s conference this year on how companies outside of software could adopt Agile practices. The event sold out, with some 350 people attending the one-day session at the Hyatt Regency Houston in downtown.
Improving — Houston plans to host even more people at its Agile Shift Conference in the spring of 2020.
“Oil and gas has started down that (Agile) journey in fervor in Houston in the past two years,” Liles said.