Itera

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the executive director of Íslandsbanki, which is a software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Itera?

We were looking for people who were interested in testing and automated testing and had chosen this as a career. We didn’t have the knowledge to do this internally and couldn’t find anyone with the knowledge to do it in Iceland, so we decided to outsource the work.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We wanted to start doing automated testing on our web solutions because we had already started to implement our APIs.

What is the team composition?

We have close to 40 employees from their side. They have a project manager and a team lead who has been a backup for the project manager if needed. We also have around 7–8 testers and 22–23 developers, including three infrastructure developers and three developers on the operational side.

How did you come to work with Itera?

We had an employee who worked with them when she lived in Norway.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in September of 2016 and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We are very pleased, and they are meeting our expectations. Their talent starts at the intern level and goes all the way up to expert level. The quality has been very good, and their company description is accurate.

How did Itera perform from a project management standpoint?

They are eager to do good work and meet us where we are. They don’t just do everything we say; there are times that we don’t agree, and they try to meet us in the middle. There are some cultural differences, but these haven’t been big issues. For example, if they don’t agree with something we are doing, they don’t want to damage our relationship, so we have a status meeting with the project manager who tells us, so we can fix what we need to.

If there is a problem with the programming, Itera usually finds out before we do so it is usually not a surprise. They keep very good track of their employees.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I have been very impressed with their high-quality training. They have high ambitions for their professional careers and emphasize the importance of their expertise in their areas.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There are things we still need to improve on both sides. It is very important that the teams who are working together meet regularly.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a commercial and private insurance company. We had some large software systems which needed to be developed for creating new products and better processes for selling insurance.

What is your position?

I am the head of business development. My department consists of myself and two project leaders in charge of larger projects, such as systems development and implementations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Itera?

When implementing new functionalities to our system, we employ a testing process with which we needed help. We also wanted to take this responsibility away from our business staff, which was tasked with the testing in the past.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Itera set up a test team for us. We divided our projects into sprints within which they tested packages a few times before release dates. They were in charge of structuring our test system and methodology. We discussed customer journeys with them, but the process never reached that point.

How did you come to work with Itera?

They had done some work for another Norwegian insurance company, and we heard some good things about them.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

Sorry, this is confidential.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in December of 2014. Our work is on hold at the moment.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We achieved a faster time-to-market for our products and system development. Itera helped us to focus on our core business through their testing services.

How did Itera perform from a project management standpoint?

Their performance was excellent. We had close collaboration with weekly status meetings and used tools like Confluence, Jira, and Skype for daily communication.

What distinguishes Itera from other providers?

They were highly motivated and willing to find solutions to our problems, which is great about them.

Is there anything Itera could have improved or done differently?

Nothing significant comes to mind.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Our company is called Storebrand Life Insurance and Pension, which is a financial services institution in the Norwegian and Swedish markets. We are a large player in occupational pension, being the biggest in Norway, and in third place in Sweden. We are also involved in the financial servicing sector for banking, property and casualty insurance, asset management, and so on.

What is your position?

I work in the internal IT organization, which currently houses around 300 employees. I handle one of the delivery units for digital and mobile, which covers all the customer-facing digital services across the whole range of our products. The team is comprised of fifty internal employees, and thirty external contractors, served by Itera.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Itera?

Prior to establishing our setup in Kiev, we'd worked with Itera through local contractors, on a small-scale, ad-hoc project base. Back in 2012, we had a dual challenge: we were faced with significant increase in development and business ambitions for the customer front, as well as some cost challenges. We needed to scale up relatively quickly, but also needed a cost-efficient method.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Right now, we're embedding thirty developers and testers from Kiev inside of our normal structures. They're involved in everything that we do around digital channels and online customer services. They work with the classical backend technologies, mostly Java and .NET. They also work on frontend development and provide testing (both manual and automated).

How did you come to work with Itera?

We found them through contractors with which we'd worked in the past. We contacted Itera and other companies with our specifications and challenges, and decided to choose them.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We pay them per hour, not per project. The rates are $50-100 per hour, depending on individual competency and seniority.

What is the status of this engagement?

We're still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The quality itself is somewhat hard to pinpoint, since we're embedding Itera's resources into our own team. We measure general satisfaction from our perspective, and in that regard, we're very satisfied. The feed-back from our internal developers and project managers is generally positive. They're very competent.

How did Itera perform from a project management standpoint?

Our general level of satisfaction is high in terms of their ability to get the right resources in place and absorb the business and domain knowledge that we provide. Some of the things that we build are country-specific, centering on pensions in Norway for example, which are unlike any others. Also, the general level of service has undergone a scaling-up for the past two or three years. They've been very easy to work with whenever we've decided to expand the work to new areas and bring in new people. It has been a lightweight and smooth process.

What distinguishes Itera from other providers?

The flexibility of the setup as a whole is a factor. We don't spend a lot of time on contracts and formal arrangements. Itera is very agile and lightweight in terms of management. Also, their general ability to procure individually-skilled resources has been good. Now that we're up to a thirty people team, they're still concerned with each person's performance and fit for the job. When we bring these resources close to our own, any weaknesses in a particular individual have a substantial effect inside the organization.

Is there anything Itera could have improved or done differently?

The general level of their communication skills could be improved. It varies from person to person. They could also be more proactive, and take the initiative on their end for technical improvements. I know that they have the skills and competence, but they seem reluctant to come up with suggestions for improvement. We need to drag these out of them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work for a group of media houses in Norway. I work in the IT division that works with common IT systems for the newspapers and also for the financial related IT systems. 

What is your position?

My area has been refined to focusing on integration in the ERP system and the invoicing process for outgoing invoices.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Itera?

Itera had been working for us before I came in. They were a company we knew and they had a good reputation in-house. Our challenge was with the invoice process that we had and it's quality of service. We had many errors in the system and little visibility of what was going on in the process, with many files getting lost in the flow. 

We used an external consulting company to give us an architectural view of our problem and a solution, and then we approached Itera to get an offer on the work we needed. They had also approached us previously with their testing methods.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We have around two to three people working on our projects for the past year and a half. We also have a local manager that has been supervising the engineers for the past six months. 

How did you come to work with Itera?

We had already worked together in the past.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative?

We have been paying three people an hourly rate for the past 18 months of work. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started two and half years ago and it has been an ongoing project.  We had several iterations for the project.  In one of the projects, they delivered a tested version of our new integration platform which we are happy with. In other departments of the organization we chose to have them integrate the platform with our existing ERP. I wanted to replace the ERP system with a newer system, so we had to rewrite all our integrations again towards this new ERP system. It was natural for us to continue with Itera to support us on that. They already knew the business model, the flow and the code.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We have been very happy with the technical work of the developers. We’ve also been happy with the work of the testers, especially with their quality and thoroughness during the testing process. They completed most of the testing part which we weren’t able to do ourselves. They are dedicated testers. We have saved a lot of money working with them. We now have finished automated tests for all the main integrations, but it’s very hard to quantify the success rate in numbers.  Overall we are very happy with their work.

How did Itera perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management began based in Norway, but after a while they’ve been doing it from Ukraine. My impression is that they’re quite thorough and punctual. They are always engaged in their work, and display great quality and great communication skills. I also appreciate their follow up tasks and efficient project management.

What distinguishes Itera from other providers?

I think what distinguishes them most is their testing approach and their solid advance on the development aspect. Overall they are very professional in everything. 

Is there anything Itera could have improved or done differently?

The developers we have now aren’t the ones we had in the beginning. There have been replacements during the project time which isn’t preferred, but I think that’s kind of natural for a long project.