Andersen

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of the internal treasury department. We’re the third-largest bank in Russia in terms of revenue.

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

We needed to develop an app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Andersen is developing a non-standard, complex application for us.

What is the team composition?

Their team consists of a project manager or scrum master, a business analyst, and front- and backend developers. There are 12–13 team members in total now, and we’re planning to expand the team in the coming months, bringing it to 15–20. We communicate with almost all of them, but most of our communication is with the business analyst and scrum master.

How did you come to work with Andersen?

The head of our group knew Andersen’s founder and had had experience with them around 10 years ago. We had a test run and liked the work that they did, so we engaged Andersen on a larger scale.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost so far is around $800,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Andersen in June 2018, and it’s ongoing.

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

We’re very happy with where Andersen is going, and we’re continuing our activities together.

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

We’re happy with their communication and transparency. The team was custom-tailored for us, and we had the chance to meet each member beforehand. We got a team of professionals that suit us the most.

We’re running an agile project, and priorities may change at a moment’s notice. Andersen is ready to provide us with their support and take on tasks that we’ve never discussed before. Their estimates are very precise for the most part, and we haven’t had problems, such as misguiding our top management on feature readiness.

We’d been using Skype for some time, and we’ve moved our activities to Discord recently. It makes it a bit easier to structure our communications, and it has automated features like bots. We’ve been managing the project in two stages, with Trello for soft task management. As the customer, we can add weakly-structured descriptions as tasks, and the business analyst and QA engineers on the Andersen side will take the input and add the task to Jira. We’re also using Confluence to add more detailed descriptions to the tasks.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Andersen is giving us the ability to take on unexpected challenges and non-standard development features. They’ve given us the opportunity to educate ourselves and our developers, and to grow together as professionals.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’ve encountered some minor hitches, but nothing serious comes to mind, and almost everything was solved immediately. There’s nothing I could mention as being bad or that I don’t like.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

The main thing is to attach yourselves to the project and communicate with the team. They should be given some context on what it is they’re developing, so that each developer will know what parts their colleagues are working on.

This is general advice, but it’s been helping us a lot. We talk very frequently to our scrum master, and that really helps. The developers aren’t just coding and adding features in a vacuum; they think solution-wide and maybe even create unexpected positive outputs.

Please describe your company and your position there.

PASHA BANK ASC AGILE COACH

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

We hired Andersen for a P2P project. This is a mobile application that allows you to get a free digital card with a mobile phone number without going to the bank. Transfer money without commission between P2P clients and so on

What were your goals for this project?

Changing people's daily payment habits

How did you select Andersen?

We have been looking for a company that meets our expectations for a long time. The best by our standards turned out to be Andersen. Their experience with Tinkoff was one of the important reviews.

Describe the project in detail.

Kvik – convenient, profitable payments and money transfers with a digital card. Benefits of the Kvik mobile app:

1. Get a free digital card immediately without going to the bank;
2. Make commission-free money transfers to other KVIK users;
3. Top up the balance of digital card with cash or cashless operations but without commission;
4. Make purchases on all domestic websites;
5. Make secure purchases on favorite websites abroad with profitable exchange rate;
6. Transparent tariffs;
7. Easy to use.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of 9 people. Product owner, designer, backend developers and frontend developers. 2 developers were employees of the Andersen company. Also, the team was assisted by experts developers, Agile Coach and an Andersen company manager

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

At the moment we are at the MVP stage, but the forecasts are very good.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

I would like to note the high professionalism (Kirill) in the process of fulfilling the assigned tasks, which is supported by significant experience, the desire to achieve results and develop.

Throughout his work in our company, he proved himself as a responsible employee and a good friend for colleagues. I would also like to note the manager of the company Andersen (Yauheniya Hrazhul , for us just Jenya))) We express our heartfelt gratitude for the sensitive attitude to the team, for high professionalism and understanding! We had great pleasure in working with this person.

Jenya is a very sympathetic, patient, caring employee who knows her job, and most importantly, helps to resolve issues quickly!

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are a professional team with a positive attitude and they are friendly.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The work was carried out in full within the pre-agreed terms, as well as in full compliance with the terms of the contract. In the course of fulfilling its obligations, the company (Andersen) promptly and professionally coped with the tasks, taking into account our wishes as a customer as much as possible. We hope for mutually beneficial and fruitful cooperation in the future.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Director of IT developpments in a company that provide professionnal applications to entities who wants to be compliant with any kind of regulation / law / standard, in the easiest possible way.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen, and what were your goals?

Our application keeps growing with new game changing feature, and we were in a need of more skilled developpers to complete our challenging roadmap in time.

How did you select Andersen and what were the deciding factors?

AndersenLab was already compliant with all our security needs. They provided intersting profiles of developpers.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

After a few period of onboarding and learning our profession, every develpper was assigned to a new project to achieve. They were all together on different tasks, but at the same time involved in the same whole project. They were also involved in our discussions about internal improvements.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We hired 4 developpers to help us in our project.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Each developper was quickly able to work on real stuff. that was the goal and we did achieve project in time thanks to them ! Besides, they were always suggesting improvements on many topics, such as source code organization, processes, techs we could use and so. Really proactive mens !

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

The contract occured during the COVID 19. Therefore everyone was working from home. But we are using MS Teams as a central tool, which gives us the feeling to have everyone next to us all the time. Management didn't really change because of that.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The hability to provide helpful feedback report. That was really helpful, pointing out issues that were hurting but true !

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

One of our developper was a bit less english skilled as we thought, but we dealled with it correctly.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO at a provider of personalized skincare through doctors. We developed an online application that helps doctors make a diagnostic of the patients’ skin and select the best combination of ingredients for their problem.

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

We needed someone to help with the UI/UX design and development of our web app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Andersen developed a web app that allows doctors to log in, register new patients, do a photo analysis, and select the best formula with the best ingredients and treatment for the patient. They designed and did the implementation. I built the AI algorithm, but they integrated it inside the whole system.

Then a year ago, we launched a doctor workshop. After preparing and selecting the best treatment for the patient, they can send the prescription over directly to the app. The patient receives a notification in email and they have a unique link and can connect to an e-commerce shop only through invitation from the doctor. Andersen also helped build the connection with third party entities through API requests.

Now we’re working on a new project of rebuilding our website because it wasn’t originally done by Andersen. This new website will launch our B2C business model that will allow us to recruit new patients not only from our doctors but directly from online advertising.

What is the team composition?

There are about 10 people that range from graphic designers, back- and frontend developers, a business analyst, dev ops, and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Andersen?

Andersen contacted me through LinkedIn. At the time, I was looking to build a new team.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2019 and it's ongoing.

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

We have 1,000 doctors working with the app and about 50,000 customers. It’s been a success. We’re still launching, and we’re not yet present in the U.S. which is our next target. 

The quality was amazing. Andersen is very focused on their work. They’re very involved in what they do and want to do it well. They want to finish on time and aren’t afraid to work overtime if needed. All the people are high quality. It’s a privilege to work with Andersen every day. They’re always available to help and find solutions. It’s a successful partnership.

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is very good. We talk almost daily to make sure everything is okay. They help when there’s a problem or a need for new resources. It’s perfect. We use Slack, Skype, Jira, Confluence, and Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have the ability to find solutions. They don’t say no and they don’t just say yes to make us happy. The feedback is very appreciated. Andersen is willing to help in a marginal way with a common objective to make the company more successful. They’re not just developers. They’re part of the team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing I’d have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I suggest visiting them to see the structure and meet the people face-to-face. Tell them what you expect.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CTO of a Business Services company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen, and what were your goals?

We hired Andersen team to help us with the development of 2 main Products and we still are working with them to constantly improve the 2nd one. The 1st project was a complex consumer behavior analytical tool, with a major dataprocessing part.

The main goal was to automate a lof of processes and provide dashboards. This project was released and doesn’t need new features or improvements. The 2nd project is a map driven application, released last year and still being improved. For this project, we had close deadlines and a full bunch of new technologies to implement, so we needed a solid technical partner.

Our goal was to create a unique team, including our internal developers and Andersen’s ones, working together. We also wanted them to challenge us on our tools & practices.

How did you select Andersen and what were the deciding factors?

Looking for a tech partner, we met several companies and choose the one what better understood our needs. They also proposed to help us from the very beginning of our projects, with Business Analyst profiles. Reliable and result-driven, Andersen was the right choice.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The 1st Product was a complex consumer behavior analytical tool, with a major dataprocessing part. We used Go Lang, Angular and Symfony. The 2nd Product is a map driven application (Angular & Laravel). Andersen took part to each step, from UX/UI design to QA.

For both projects, our internal developers and Andersen’s team worked together, doing a unique and performant Project team and sharing their respective knowledge. We organized several meetings in their own offices and the collaboration of the whole team was very efficient.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

For 3,5 years we’ve been working with a dozen of Andersen people, including PHP developers, Angular developers, Go Lang developer, Project Managers, UI/UX designer, QA engineers, Business Analysts; who were added to the team upon business needs of different timeframes.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The 1st Product was released after about 1 year of collaboration and is still proposed to our customers. The dataprocessing part is still running everyday and without any issues.

The 2nd Product is online since about 1 year and a half now, and we have already released 7 major versions. The Product is stable and we have positive feedback from our customers. The team is performing well and we continue to work with them to maintain and constantly improve the solution.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Their Project Managers are managing the projects, in constant interaction with the whole team and the company stakeholders. They work on different parts of the projects and constantly propose improvements. They are real assets for such successful projects. We communicate easily through emails, Skype, Slack, upon reasonable needs.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Whenever we need to increase the team upon our needs, Andersen is helping us to find and onboard required specialists. Also we have direct access to the team, which makes it easier to communicate our business and project needs. Andersen’s managers are also very involved in their projects and very helpful.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

While the quality of work is high, some task estimations could have been more accurate. But taking into account the complexity of our projects, it’s perfectly understandable. Anyway, Project Managers and the team are aware of this, and are improving the process.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Managing director at a Geman based machine building company

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen, and what were your goals?

Development and maintenance of a Java / web based internal tool within our ERP landscape.

How did you select Andersen and what were the deciding factors?

we were aproached by andersen at the right time and did choose them among others based on responsiveness and personell quality.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

worked together with our internal team as addtional ressource.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

1 project member/software engineer

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

provided great staff, excellent project controlling

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

n.a.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We were most impressed with the quality of attitude the team has and their drive to improve their service.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

n.a.