Avenga

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a fintech company that operates in the accounts receivable, supply chain, and other B2B financing products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

We had a complex platform that needed to be completely re-architected. It was built inside the Salesforce portal as a PaaS (platform as a service), so we needed a specific skill set.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Avenga provides custom software development services. They’ve developed an application using the Salesforce platform. It’s an internal-facing application with some components that face external users, and they’ve revamped the existing system. 

Initially, we developed the requirements and new architecture. We’ve used many of the Salesforce-provided functions. Avenga has done a bit of coding, but we’ve also used declarative automation, customer customization, better metadata, and so on. All in all, the project has lots of complications and a very complex workflow.

What is the team composition?

We just have one Salesforce developer.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

They were a referral. The Salesforce environment required a broad and deep knowledge of the industry and our application, and Avenga was the only resource we could find.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in July 2020, and our partnership is ongoing.

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

We’ve done three major and dozens of minor rollouts, all of which have been successful.

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

They use our project management tools, and we mainly communicate through Teams.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their resources and talents are outstanding. Their bench is full of experts; they provide a service we couldn’t get anywhere else.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, their business continuity plans are flawless. It would’ve been reasonable if their service was impacted due to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, but there hasn’t been an interruption.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust their experts. Their team is highly qualified, and you should trust their advice.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the VP Quality Engineering and Release Management

For what projects/services did your company hire Avenga?

Avenga is one of our partners helping us implement our product's roadmap as a team's capacity extension .

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We started our partnership in April last year, with only a few resources. 

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Following our first experience, with quite good feedback from teams such as; qualified developers and testers, good soft skills in terms of communication and engagement. Since we never stopped expanding our collaboration, currently we do have 22 HCs.

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

22 HCs, Daily contact with all team members, and with the Account Manager

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

We do particularly appreciate their reactivity to ramp up, also their ability to manage the turnover when this happens ; a notice in advance, with overlapping periods of time, and a minimum of team velocity impact. Most of the resources are based in Ukraine, after the recent events, they relocated few members to Poland, and they are still seeking to build a shadow team in Poland. This looks like a challenge for them since the Polish market is also impacted and under pressure. They do care really well about their people, which is really key in their engagement to get them motivated and productive for their customers.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Daily collaboration as they are pat of the same Agile teams

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

In conclusion, I do really recommend Avenge as a partner you can rely on. The main challenge is with Ukrainian ressources location, which is in a war zone unfortunately, with the risk associated with that. Hope this is useful for your consideration.

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

Relocation challenges they are facing while requested to relocate ressources from Ukraine following recent events

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the COO of an online software company. We aim to be a marketplace that allows people to exchange services easily.

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

We hired Perfectial to help build out our online custom software. Our main goal was to build an mvp as quick as possible.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Perfectial was selected via our CEO. Major deciding factors for us was availability, communication and costs. All we're met with Perfectial at the time of setting up the partnership.

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

Perfectial helped us begin the process of building our code, as well as creating the UX and UI for our mvp. Project steps were based on the desired functionality of the platform. Some engineers even went beyond this to help us with other issues we incurred along the way. Technologies that we integrated to help achieve the aim of our website we're twilio, pubnub, stripe etc.

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

The maximum number of team members that we worked with were 3 people. One senior engineer, one engineer and a senior ux designer.

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

We almost completed the mvp for our website on the development side. UX was completely finished by the end of our time with Perfectial.

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

The project management was really great. We really appreciated their ability to be so flexible. On a daily basis, the team communicated over teams and slack. Tasks were delegated through platforms such as trello and github.

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

What I found the most impressive was their devotion to making sure our needs we're met. They understood our demands, and tried their upmost to fulfill these. They we're also super communicative, easy to reach at all times and had a positive attitude through out the whole project.

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

The quality of the work achieved by their team was great and we are extremely happy with them. The only recommendation I have, is to create a better process to onboard using testing (our requirement). That being said, I could tell they really tried their absolute best to bring in top talent for us whilst using this method.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a world leader in the Arts sector, based in London, UK. I head up the Digital Products team, responsible for all digital touchpoints with our global audiences.

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

We wanted to augment our in house team with an additional team of software engineers, quality assurance, delivery managers and designers. Initially we engaged with Perfectial on a small part of our digital offering to deliver a discrete piece of work. The relationship grew organically from there.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We looked at a number of vendors, eventually shortlisting four based on their responses to our RFP. We ranked them on a number of standard factors including technical skills and design capabilities.

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

The Perfectial team augment our in house team, aligning with our ways of working, led by our people. We try to work on products, rather than projects, so the team shift focus according to our needs across our suite of products. They are able to offer candidates to suit all of our needs but our tech stack largely consists of JavaScript (in various flavours) right now.

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

We have a standing team which consists of a mixture of junior, midweight and senior developers (some fullstack), QAs, a delivery manager and a UX designer. Occasionally this flexes up or down, based on our needs.

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

The deliverables are consistently to a high standard. The team's excellent support has helped us build our credentials internally with our stakeholders.

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

The team aligned with our existing ways of working, which was perfect. They also run their own internal stand-ups to make sure they are aligned and feel part of the wider Perfectial community. We use Slack and Jira as our standard toolset, with Teams for video calls within the product teams day to day. The combination works well. We also have weekly checkpoints with our project/delivery/account manager for service checks and general engagement.

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

Their talent identification and onboarding. We've never encountered a problem in bringing additional people with new skillsets on demand. They're also keen to push their internal talent pipeline and are always looking at effective ways to bring junior staff onboard.

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

They're a terrific partner but as the relationship grows we'll expect to see more technical and thought leadership.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Regional Pricing Leader and Global Application Owner for Pricing Tools for a global automation company.

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

We were rolling out a global pricing program within the division and were in need of a scalable global application that can provide price guidance to our users when quoting to customers. We needed this application to integrate well with some of our existing tools in our systems landscape and be available in the cloud as well as have mobile capabilities.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We conducted our due diligence on opening the requirements/bid to about 4 companies and accepted proposals. Avenga was one of the candidates and they have done some work for us in the past with another global application.

Based on what was presented back and their track record with us from past we chose Avenga as the vendor for the new application development as well.

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

They understood the business needs and processes well and started the development based on agile methodologies in 2 weeks sprints. We've divided out functionality rollouts into multiple segments based on data needs, user interface, approval flow, integration to other tools. All development and releases went per plan.

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

There were 4 people in the core team, including a project manager, a UI designer, 2 developers. Other resources would be brought onboard as needed.

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

The global pricing application has been rolled out to 70% of the countries we operate in and they are on track to support rollout to rest of the countries. Today 90% of our quote volume for products is processed to this new application.

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

Their project management, developer working style, and communication were great. The team met all the deadlines and where there were challenges they worked together to resolve.

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

The resources were very accessible and communicated openly. They have competent resources all across and partnered well with our business users.

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

They have delivered a high-quality product that was easy to work with. However they can do better in documentation and this has been communicated. They are working on improving this.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a software company that builds and delivers AI solutions to the life sciences industry.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

We engaged Avenga to augment our in-house software development team and work on both our web and iOS applications.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Avenga is part of our development team and helps build out the iOS app we deliver to our customers. They work on different components of the app and use Swift. For the web app, their team has worked on its front-end and middle-tier logic. Their team uses our existing framework based in Node.js, GraphQL, and React. We provide them with architecture and design requirements.

What is the team composition?

We work with anywhere from 6–16 individuals, including software developers, architects, and program managers.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

One of our employees had prior experience with them, which was very positive. When we needed to augment our development team, she recommended them.

How much have you invested with them?

It’s close to $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership began around August 2020.

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

From almost day one, their team was able to work with our existing team and existing technologies. We’re able to maintain our product release cycles with Avenga. They're part of our product development pipeline. Their team brings our customers new features. They're really smart individuals who know how to build software.

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

We use a combination of Jira and Confluence to manage the requirements, architecture, and daily development tasks.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I'm impressed by their ability to scale and bring high-quality individuals into development processes and teams.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We use a variety of technologies and would further engage them if Avenga were to invest in other popular technology stacks. As they bring those skills in-house, we foresee an opportunity to continue leveraging them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You want to come into the engagement with clear requirements, designs, and documentation around your architecture. That will help them quickly ramp up and deliver the quality you seek.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Sr product Manager for Mirantis. Mirantis provides enterprise grade Cloud Native Platform providing Container and Virtual Machine platforms built on Open Source technologies such as Kubernetes and openStack.

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

We needed a Big Data savvy partner to help design and implement a multi facited project which captures valuable product usage insights for internal consumption as well as the architecture required to support usage based billing.

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

They were required to submit a proposal with initial architectures from a SOW and use case based requirements. Constrains were that the system must be built purely with Open Source components and be horizontally scalable.

Perfectial proposed a data ingestion pipeline, feeding a data lake with processing via Spark to populate a reporting DB that supplied telemetry to a web portal front end. They were chosen based on their proposal, which fit our notion of how we wanted the solution to look, as well as competitive pricing.

Their expertise in this area was also a strong contributing factor to their selection.

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

They designed and developed the system, working with Mirantis Product experts based on the initial design from the proposal. Additional requirements were communicated with design reviews prior to the start of incremental implementation.

They also researched and selected the Azure cloud using Deltalake as the data lake and Azure's Kafka compatible ingestion layer and Spark offering, as well as the Time Series DB and web =server infrastructure,

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

Team of 6:

• Big Data Architect
• Spark developers
• DevOps engineer
• Web Portal developer
• QA Automation engineer
• Project Manager

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

The system is in production today, working well. Agile development continuously adds capability to the platform.

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

Very good, PM handles most Jira management, team dynamics, monthly team work summaries. Communication was via Slack, Google hangouts, email. All communications were done in timely manner. For example when a key team member decided to leave they immediately informed us with a transition plan to a new hire.

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

They are easy to work with, stemming from core competence in the projects main area, good project management, and perhaps above all - they are easy to work with. The personalities of all team members are friendly with a shared desire for success.

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

None

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the VP of Product and Engineering at Klara. I manage a team of 40 including Product, Design, Engineering, DevOps/SRE. We are a SAAS service that aims to improve communication between a doctor and a patient.

We are founded in Berlin, but our target market is 100% US based. We are funded by Google Gradient, FristCressey Ventures and Firstmark

For what projects/services did your company hire Perfectial?

We originally hired a team of 5 people to take on our EHR integration challenges. The intent was to build a team that would focus exclusively on integrating with these health systems

What were your goals for this project?

We started the project with the intent to build a team for the long-term. My business goal was to establish a staff-aug partner to assist our staffing efforts and provide additional options and flexibility for us as a company for engineering talent.

On the technical side, the goals were to build out an integration roughly every 3 mo.

How did you select Perfectial?

I did a vendor selection process. I had worked with Perfectial before, but only a small project. I narrowed this down to 3 companies.

At this point it came down to who could provide the candidates fastest that would pass our interview screen. Perfectial won this.

Describe the project in detail.

The project was mostly backend work in Ruby. the engineers h ad to learn proprietary apis from EHR companies like Athena, Allscripts etc. They had to learn the FHIR standard.

They build an initial integration (Nextech) and then followed up with one pretty much every quarter thereafter....

Since then, we've introduced partner apis and other integrations to this team and expanded their scope. Our stack was Ruby/PostGres with React front end. All webbased

What was the team composition?

1 project manager 4 backend engineers. (2 Sr, 2 intermediate) we now are at 1 project manager 1 TL 5 Sr 3 Intermediate 2 QA

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

Today, this team is fully integrated into our business, and every day they play a key role in the Klara team.

They have subject matter expertise and component ownership over a critical piece of our software: 5+ successful EHR Integrations have been key to this team’s success and Klara’s success.

Each one has been a revenue driver for us. Additionally, during this time, we’ve only lost one engineer (who actually decided to return to our team during COVID). This team also supports requests from our most strategic and important customers.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The team is fully integrated now. From a workflow perspective, they act like any engineer on our team and you wouldn't know they are part of Perfectial unless you asked them Early on, we had a separate track for them and a dedicated Product manager.

We had the Lviv team and the Berlin team and there was a clear separation with regard to meetings etc....We have evolved as trust was built, and the team has started making an impact in other areas.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Our project manager. She is totally totally awesome. Team cohesion. I think their team has a very positive attitude Support on business issues...like HIPAA compliance and security reviews

Are there any areas for improvement?

not really

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the IT manager for a banking institution.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

We run a few high profiles in the investment banking part of the bank. We needed staff augmentation and consulting help.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Avenga provides Java programmers and web developers.

What is the team composition?

They are supplying 5–10 consultants.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

They had a relationship with our company before I joined.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2017, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

They provided us with quite a lot of people within a limited time. If I had to calculate the impact, it’s relatively high, especially on their high profile projects. They’re doing a good job, and they’re a high-quality partner.

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

We have project managers on our side. They’re managed internally by us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Avenga has good account management, and the team is top-notch.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am responsible for global delivery and software engineering taking place outside of our local markets. I am also the managing director of our Polish entity where we have an engineering center.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

They helped augment our staff. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Avenga found candidates to support our IT projects in Poland. We needed .NET and Java developers to support one side of our business. We also are looking at Microsoft Dynamics because we are building several solutions on Microsoft Dynamics in finance and operations, and also business central.

Avenga compiled profiles of candidates with either a general engineering background or more specific, niche expertise for us to consider.   

We also use their consulting services and asked for technological advice on products that we are rolling out internally. 

What is the team composition?

We have about 20 people on contract right now.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

We found them through recommendations.

How much have you invested in them?

We spend around $1.5 million per year (approximately $3 million in total).

What is the status of this engagement?

The first contract was from in February 2018.

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

We have found some really good people through Avenga; we now have some awesome people working on our account.

Overall, we're very happy with the collaboration with Avenga. There were two people that we had to get rid of and one person found another job. Apart from that, we retain more than 96% of the people they send us.  They hit the mark and are able to find the right consultant for us. 

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

It has been very good. The people we have had the pleasure of working with have all been very engaged. They've been very good at communicating, and have been open and transparent about various challenges.

They are very attentive, honest, and transparent which were all important factors at the beginning of our engagement.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We work with a lot of talented people and it is also a pleasure to see that a lot of females are sitting in higher management positions in Avenga. I think it sends an awesome message to the whole of IT because there are a lot of men in IT. I couldn’t be happier with the performance of the developers and engineers that are female.

I think it sends a strong message to everyone. Avenga does not only talk the talk about equal opportunity they also walk the walk which is super important for us. In our engineering center, we might not reach 50/50 men and women tomorrow. However, we are working hard to be an attractive workplace for girls in IT and it's essential that our strategic partners align with us strategically as we are rapidly growing the female ratio of our IT talent. Avenga is leading the way in this aspect.

Are there any areas they could improve?

One of our other partners has a pretty fantastic online administration system that we wish Avenga would use. The tool lets them manage all the consultants that we have on contract with them, view the data regarding their rates, and monitor the expiry of the contract. Everything can be called out electronically from this portal. 

When we ask, they will send all that information to us and it doesn’t take very long. Still, I believe in self-service so if I can log in to a portal a see all of that, then I don’t have to disturb anyone on the team.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be absolutely transparent about your needs, what kind of success factors you have, and the type of candidates you are looking for. Transparency will help them deliver what you want.