and others came from the consumer world. The team was
built this way to ensure we did not build another typical
Kronos solution – we wanted to develop something unique
and innovative compared to our existing offerings.
We also parachuted this team into a no frills, bare bones
environment. It was a small office space at a nondescript
office park located about 20 miles from our corporate head-
quarters in Massachusetts. The project team did not even
get their own phone lines – they relied on their cell phones.
We wanted to replicate the entrepreneurial spirit that per-
meates most successful startups as best we could, with one
key exception: this startup had the backing of the bil-
lion-dollar company they were tasked with disrupting.
Four Factors for the Future
The success of Project Falcon was never guaranteed. While
the team was tasked with putting Kronos out of business, it
still had to deliver the framework for a new solution that
would earn the confidence of Aron and our leadership team.
Over time, that framework began to come into focus. There
were four key factors that we identified as incumbent to
success.
First, we recognized the opportunity to incorporate new
and emerging technologies into the solution to create capa-
bilities that simply cannot be achieved with tools available
to the prior generation. This included artificial intelligence
and machine learning, real-time analytics and data analysis
and the ability to deliver real-time information to users in
the moment a key decision had to be made.
Second, we decided it was time to build a cloud-native plat-
form from the ground up. Since Kronos last did a technol-
ogy refresh, a whole world of resources had become avail-
able via the public cloud that would benefit our team and
40 | THE DOPPLER |
WINTER 2019
our customers with regard to delivery, DevOps, cloud scal-
ing, performance and cloud services.
Next, we wanted to bring our decades of domain experi-
ence in the workforce management field into clearer focus.
We wanted to think differently about ways our customers
would want to manage schedules, collect time, monitor
compliance, conduct reporting and, in general, engage with
their employees. An entirely new domain model which chal-
lenged us to reimagine how we capture, manage, report
and calculate data was required.
Lastly, the ubiquity of mobile was going to continue to influ-
ence user preferences. Rather than tweak our existing look
and feel, then scale it down into a crisp mobile application,
we redesigned our entire user experience to be optimized
for mobile first, and then scale up with responsive design.
This also required us to reimagine hundreds of processes –
like asking for time off – to be achieved in just one or two
clicks.
Moving to the Public Cloud
While it may seem obvious today, six or so years ago when
Project Falcon first launched, the public cloud was not the
obvious destination. However, over time, many of our early
concerns were mitigated, and we recognized the benefits of
the public cloud for both Kronos and our customers.
Public cloud removed Kronos from the business of having
to procure hardware and manage servers. It allowed us to
benefit from the continued investments made by our public
cloud partner – right now, Google Cloud Platform – in secu-
rity, infrastructure and other areas. We could scale more
quickly and act in a more elastic manner, deploying a whole
new stack in a matter of hours.