How does a UK company work with a team in Istanbul?
Istanbul uses UTC+3 all year. The United Kingdom is on GMT (UTC+0) in winter and BST (UTC+1) in summer, so Istanbul is three hours ahead in winter and two hours ahead in summer. A 09:00 start in the UK is 12:00 or 11:00 in Istanbul. Shared working hours fall in the UK morning and the first half of the afternoon, and that is where we schedule daily meetings.
The process is designed for remote collaboration: a discovery meeting online or in person, a written architecture proposal and project plan, two-week sprints and a working demo at the end of each sprint. Progress is tracked on a Jira or Linear board, there is a weekly status meeting, and a direct Slack channel stays open for urgent matters.
What language does the project run in?
For UK clients, meetings, sprint reports, technical documentation and handover documents are all in English. Our project management and documentation already run in Turkish and English, so this needs no special setup. If your product will publish in other languages too, the multilingual architecture is built in from the start.
How do the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 shape the software?
After leaving the EU, the United Kingdom carried the GDPR into its own law as the UK GDPR, which applies alongside the Data Protection Act 2018. On the software side this framework turns into concrete architecture decisions:
- Which personal data is collected, and for what purpose
- Where the data is hosted
- Role-based access and access logs
- How erasure requests and subject access requests are handled
The legal assessment is settled with your adviser; we make sure those decisions are implemented correctly in the code and the infrastructure. On the Turkish side, where our team works, KVKK applies.
Which project have we delivered in the UK?
BYA Consultancy wanted to connect families and students with summer school programmes around the world. The existing process relied on manual content management, email correspondence and scattered information sources. World Summer Schools, which we built from scratch, answers that need:
- Global programme catalogue: programmes can be filtered by age, country, programme type and dates.
- AI-assisted content entry: after content managers enter raw data, an OpenAI integration produces summaries and category suggestions, which noticeably reduces manual work.
- Role-based permissions: separate permissions for visitors, consultants and administrators keep content management secure.
- Infrastructure: a cloud-based, scalable stack on Next.js, .NET and PostgreSQL, with CI/CD automation through Jenkins.
Where do you draw the data boundary in an AI integration?
At World Summer Schools, AI is used to speed up content entry: the model produces summaries and category suggestions, and content managers work with those suggestions. In a similar integration we first decide which data is sent to the model, which data stays inside the system and how the accuracy of the output will be measured. Where personal data is involved, that boundary is designed together with UK GDPR requirements.
What happens to the code and support after delivery?
On delivery, full ownership of the source code passes to you, and the transfer is written explicitly into the contract. Thirty days of post-launch support are included, after which monthly maintenance packages are available. For pricing you choose between a fixed-price and a time and materials model, and the proposal is sent in writing after the discovery call.