Avenga

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. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work at a large multinational industrial company with operations in more than 100 countries. We have around 110,000 employees. I work as part of the communications department, and I’m responsible for our websites, including our public website as well as our corporate intranet.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

We used Avenga as experts to develop our website and then the intranet.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we used them under more of a staff augmentation model. We had people from Avenga who worked for us as contractors, so they worked for us as if they were our own employees. The resources we employed from them were mostly from the developer side, but also UX designers and other technical subject matter experts.

They took care of the maintenance of the web platform from a technical point of view. That entailed developing new features for the website, which ranged from conceptual and UX design to technical implementation. They also did testing and were responsible for keeping the website up and running.

The CMS we use is Sitefinity, which is based on Microsoft .NET. Most of the competencies on the technical side were on Microsoft .NET. We also have some smaller WordPress websites, so they provided developers with WordPress competencies.

What is the team composition?

We worked with an average of 30 people; it varied a bit, depending on the phases of the project. We set up the team so that we had a number of product owners onsite at our company headquarters, and then their counterparts were at Avenga’s site. The team members offsite acted as both scrum masters as well as application managers, so in addition to running the daily scrum, they also oversaw the products or software that they were developing.

We also interacted with the functional analysts on their side, as well as UX designers. We didn’t interact directly with the rest of the people on their team.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

We have a very long history with them. We originally started working with them because our company had a strategic setup where we were using internal resources based in Poland for some of our IT projects. Then, we decided to outsource. Many of those internal employees formed a company called Solid Brain, which was acquired by Avenga.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together began around late 2015, and the project finished in June 2020.

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

They had a number of people who were really subject matter experts in very specific areas, like information security, test automation, or web analytics. If we needed support in an area for which they had an expert within their company, the expertise was really good. On the negative side, they sometimes didn’t necessarily have all of the competencies and expertise, so for some other areas, we’d have to pull the expertise from elsewhere.

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was generally okay. We used the scrum methodology. I think communication could’ve been a bit bitter. They were a bit weak in terms of internal collaboration, but that could’ve had to do with our model, through which we were hiring people from them to then work for us like they were part of our team. A problem was that they weren’t very good at communicating with other parts of their own company; for instance, if there was a particular challenge where we were looking for specific expertise, they weren’t very proactive about finding that expert within their own company. We’d have to go to the account manager.

Some of the subject matter experts were really good, but they were like isolated hero characters, whereas the average person that we worked with wasn’t that strong. When we were dealing with a subject matter expert, we got exactly what we wanted from them. However, some of their team members weren’t able to work as a team. The coordination didn’t always work out very well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were pretty good at running some of the scrum ceremonies, such as sprint reviews. During the reviews, they demonstrated the work they’d done over the previous two weeks. I thought those were usually professionally executed, especially compared to some other companies we’ve dealt with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When we worked with one of the individuals on their side, that usually worked really well. However, as soon as that individual needed to involve other people from their company, it didn’t work as well.

Any advice for potential customers?

You have to know pretty precisely what you want and be able to specify that upfront. They do have some people who are best-in-class in their specific areas, but it’s important that you know to ask for specific competencies; you can’t just expect that you will get the best people by default. It also helps to know their organization and the references of their resources, so that you can pick the best people that they can provide.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re an IT provider for a group of companies. We’re active across the globe and have about 500 tech employees in Austria. We provide software solutions and services to the group’s different organizational entities. In Austria, we’re developing a software system that provides all of the critical business processes for any type of insurance company. The system has been developed for nearly two decades, and it serves as a strategic solution for the entire group.

In Vienna, we have three different delivery centers. One provides the core solution, a generic version of the system that is adapted by different optimization units to the specific needs of our end-customer. I am involved in one of these customization departments, so I’m adding the delivery and cross-functional teams for our end-customer, a partner of the group. We are taking over the system’s core and are developing it, customizing it, and changing some requirements and features to enable the system to work for the end-customer, a global organization focused on travel, event, and device insurance as well as assistance services.

What challenge were you trying to address with Avenga?

We have a high demand for external contributors. We’re always looking to fill specific positions — sometimes on a temporary basis — for experts in various areas, such as business analysts, developers, testers, test managers, and specific specialty positions. Since we’re growing very fast, we have to react very flexibly to the demands of our end-customers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Avenga has become one of our trusted service providers. They regularly work with us to fill the expert positions we have open. They work with us in the same way as our internal employees: they’re part of the team and contribute like all of the other team members. We have two separate streams of development for the different needs of our customers. We have teams that work on the travel insurance side and on the assistance business. However, they both work on the same code base. 

Our teams consist of both internal and external contractual partners that work closely with our product owners. Our product owners come from our customer audience partners and define the requirements for the teams. We’re currently working toward three major releases of our system per year. We work in two-week sprints, and we have intermediate, bi-weekly minor releases for the customer as well.

What is the team composition?

I’m responsible for staffing the developer side of things, so mostly Java and phase one developers. If we have a requirement for business analysts or project managers, another department handles that.

We typically have an extensive selection process with two rounds of interviews to ensure the consultant or specialist fits with the team. We currently have about 15 contractors that are distributed across different teams and projects.

How did you come to work with Avenga?

I can’t tell you how we originally came to work with them because it precedes my role in the project. However, they were one of the group’s first partners. The quality of their profiles impressed us, as did the experts that they came up with. We were also impressed by their communication.

How much have you invested with them?

I’d estimate that we spent about $1 million–$1.5 million per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

I believe Avenga has worked with the group for 3–4 years, if not longer.

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

They have fast reaction times and quickly resolve issues.

How did Avenga perform from a project management standpoint?

The account manager we work with is very helpful and diligent about coming up with solutions that work for us. We have a very open and honest atmosphere. If there’s a problem, we can quickly resolve it and find a solution that is beneficial to us.

The communication style, the experts they provide, and their management style is what has made us stay with them as a partner. They’re close by and can drop by for a face-to-face discussion.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very diligent with their preselection process. Sometimes, providers send all kinds of profiles that aren’t suitable or don’t fill your base requirements. Avenga makes sure that they preselect the appropriate resources that have the skills we need. In general, they have a very solid process.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing I’d have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be open about any problems you encounter or if you’re not satisfied with one of your contractors. They will make sure that problems get solved, such as finding a replacement candidate. Work on building a relationship with them. Maintain communication and provide regular feedback on how the contractors are performing.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Solution Architect in telco company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Avenga?

IT Consulting

What were your goals for this project?

Migrate the workload to Cloud

How did you select Avenga?

Quality of the services

Describe the project in detail.

There was a requirement to work with the specific technology and IT consultancy was essential. We got the expected support from the vendor.

What was the team composition?

Team consisted of 10 people (Solution Architects, Solution Engineers)

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

IT competency allowed to meet all expectations and the project goals

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Agile approach was taken.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were impressed with the quality of the service and IT competency level.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Fairfield Marketplace. We’re a startup in the FinTech domain that offers services such as non-performing loan management and debt collection.

What challenge were you trying to address with Perfectial?

We needed help with developing our platform. I also wanted a team that I’ve worked with before, particularly one that is flexible, scalable, and reliable.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Perfectial developed the frontend of our platform using simple yet portable languages, such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and React for multi-platform adaption. They recently started working with me and other resources to build out services and the backend site. For those parts, we’re using Python and AWS services.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with a total of seven technical people and one project/account manager.

How did you come to work with Perfectial?

I first worked with Perfectial in 2010 when I was at a different company based in San Francisco. We had a decent-sized internal team, but we were overstretched in trying to build new functionalities and regulatory requirements on our roadmap. A former colleague introduced me to Perfectial. Our first project together involved multi-factor authentication. 

Perfectial was always clear on what they could and could not deliver, and they met every commitment that they agreed to. That’s one of the significant values of working with them. This platform will be my sixth or seventh project with Perfectial.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent €150,000–€200,000 (approximately $166,000–$220,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

The project began in November 2018 and is ongoing.

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

We’ve measured Perfectial alongside our internal team in terms of the efficient and effectiveness of their development. Perfectial has performed well so far—they’re very good at delivering on our requirements. We’re currently in the pre-launch stage.

How did Perfectial perform from a project management standpoint?

As I said before, Perfectial is upfront about what they can and cannot do based on our requirements and expectations. They’re careful to outline potential gaps or risks. We keep in touch with our project manager regularly, who’s been very helpful in managing the whole process.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’d name several things. First, the breadth of technology that Perfectial can work with is impressive. Running a startup, we don’t necessarily have a lot of time to manage multiple providers to cover our technology stack. Having a single vendor that flexibly offers resources to meet our requirements is incredibly valuable. 

Second, their ability to deliver on commitments stands out. Third and finally, because we’re relatively close to each other—we're both in Europe—it’s much easier for me to work with Perfectial than with other providers located elsewhere.

Are there any areas they could improve?

More communication on the project management side can be helpful. That said, when things haven’t gone exactly as I expected, Perfectial is quick to adjust their team or processes so they can still fulfill their commitments.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be very clear, especially with the project manager or account manager, what your requirements are. In any remote collaboration, communicating your needs can be somewhat challenging. You need to interact more with a project manager so that they understand precisely what you expect.