Sysvale and LPI: Strategic Planning in Times of COVID-19

When 2019 was just about to end, I got a message from Eugênio Marques, CEO of Sysvale Softgroup, a healthtech that has been collaborating with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) since its foundation a little more than five years ago. Eugênio asked me to recommend someone who could host their strategic planning sessions and he also invited me to participate in these sessions as they wanted to formalize their Hiring Partner and devise specific actions in this regard.

It’s worth noticing even before LPI had the Hiring Partner Program, Sysvale did create their own “Sysvale Certificada” program, promoting certifications among its collaborators and also opening it to the surrounding community, partnering with two major universities in the region, FACAPE and UNIVASF. The company is also well known for its award winning Free Technology Residence program, inspired by the health related residences where soon to be graduating students have the opportunity to learn by doing — and being paid for this — for a period varying from six to eighteen months before they are really ready to face the ICT market. Pretty much all of these students end up being hired by Sysvale or creating their own companies.

With the energetic help of Maria Gabriela Gomes Ferreira, the majority of Sysvale Team and myself, representing LPI, we started the strategic planning sessions on January, 6th, 2020. The sessions ended with a public presentation at the event “Sysvale Convida II”, on January 10th, where I talked about ICT careers (There are no quick tricks in the Magic World of ICT was the name of my talk) and Gabriela talked about her ten years journey helping companies to better prepare for their future.

By the end of February, 2020, the planning sessions continued on, now with Luiza Janeri, Agile Coach and OKR Specialist. Again, Luiza provided a talk to the extended community on how to use OKR (Objective and Key Results) metrics to better your personal life.

Then came the Coronavirus …

Being an agile development company, Sysvale soon launched a solution to help all cities in Brazil to map the status of COVID-19 reach. The Northeastern based health tech assemble a team of developers, administrators, health professionals and public administrators from within and outside of the company to create a tool to provide clear information on the outbreak to the general public and, at the same time, gather individual, voluntary information about their health conditions, allowing health related public servers to take direct action in a very early stage.

“The lack of information to the regular citizen is one of the greatest problems we are facing this moment and this is exactly where we have targeted our solution,” says Eugenio Marques, Sysvale’s CEO. The solution, LigaSaudável, is totally based on Open Source Software and it is free for every citizen to use. Although it is targeted to Brazilian people and the reality Brazil is facing right now, the solution can readily be used by any Portuguese speaking region and can be easily ported to other languages.

Among several actions planned for 2020 are two open LPI certification events to be produced in partnership with the local academia, a “MeetUp” style, free Linux Essentials Training and the polishing of Sysvale’s DevOps Hello World workshop.

By better preparing its own team and also the surrounding community by using LPI’s certifications, Sysvale will place its feet on the international market in 2020, first within Portuguese speaking areas of the world such as Portugal, Mozambique, East Timor, Macao, Angola and Goa.