Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing director at Happy End CZ. We distribute safety and environmental products and services to industrial companies.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s.?

We hired Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s to redesign our website. We wanted a professional e-commerce website, a strong engine, and automated features that would enable growth.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team is redesigning our website using Kentico. They’ve done a UX analysis to make improvements on the existing designs.

What is the team composition?

We regularly work with an account manager, an analyst, and a software developer. They often loop in the UX specialist, graphic designer, and various consultants.

How did you come to work with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s.?

We had worked with the team on another project—an iPad application for our sales force—and they approached us again. We chose Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s. because they offered a good price for a professional solution.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $110,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2018 and the partnership is ongoing.

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

We’re happy with their UX team. The project is still in progress; we’ll launch the new site in January 2019.

How did Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s. perform from a project management standpoint?

The team guides us through the process and sticks to timelines. Fortunately, we don’t have to manage the schedule or process. We have about five project update meetings per month.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions a.s. has notable software development expertise and capabilities. The team is highly organized and makes the partnership enjoyable. Also, they are flexible and remain open to new ideas, even if those implementations require a few extra hours of work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’ve increased our demands and requirements, but they don’t say “no” easily. However, the project is moving smoothly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Clients should trust them and let them do their job. They’re good at analysis and spend time walking us through the process. They take the initiative; we don’t have to push them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m currently an expert in HR automation innovation for a large European international telecommunications company. I used to be the product manager for our company’s voicemail products, namely the mobile voicemail app for Android devices.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions?

We wanted an Android app for our voicemail system because voicemail wasn’t supported natively on the Android OS. The first version was developed in-house, but it quickly became outdated. We decided to outsource the dev and began looking for a vendor.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cleverlance did the initial development of the app and its maintenance. When I came on board, we did a major relaunch of the app, including large tech changes and redevelopment from the ground up. They made the app for both Android and iOS, although they’re currently only available in Germany. We plan to at least roll the Android app out to the rest of our European markets soon.

During the project, we shifted the design efforts from in-house to Cleverlance. They knew our style guides and were already doing the dev, so they agreed and hired a designer. We still have the final say; they just provide the resource.

Cleverlance does their own internal testing to make sure the app is working properly. They do all the standardized tests, such as IT and unit tests. Their QA department reviews the app every sprint to solve any bugs before we see them.

We’ve also worked on other projects with Cleverlance, including a desk sharing chatbot that helps us book daily work tasks.

What is the team composition?

We have one main point of contact who organizes all the contract details for new developments. Once the projects begin, we typically have a scrum team for each OS. Cleverlance provides the scrum master, developers, and designer. The product owner is always someone from our company.

How did you come to work with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions?

Cleverlance was recommended by one of our European subsidiaries who’d worked with them before and had a great experience.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked together since 2013.

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

When Cleverlance developed the first version of the app, our IT department did an in-depth code review. They said it met their expectations in terms of data privacy, security, and documentation. We receive a lot of customer feedback, and as long as it’s above four stars, we’re happy.

Because it’s scrum and agile development, we don’t expect to have one large release where everything is working. Rather, we have smaller releases where things incrementally get better. However, the first public release is always high quality to meet customers’ expectations. Cleverlance and our in-house team test the products, and we never find any large bugs. After launch, we expect Cleverlance to fix any issues that customers report.

We’ve introduced several key performance indicators (KPIs) over the past few years, including crash analytics. Over the course of six launches, our crash rate went from 5% to 0.5%, which is impressive.

How did Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

We run regular sprints and scrum setups, planning everything together to prioritize the work. It’s usually hard to work with a scrum team in a different location, but they’re incredibly adept at making the team function well. They’re motivated and use necessary collaboration tools (like Slack and Jira) to keep everyone synchronized and updated.

We had some trouble with the language barrier early on, but it hasn’t been a problem for the past few years. Their organization and communication are excellent, and we’re very happy with their work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their level of engagement and motivation is outstanding. We’ve never regretted working with them. They had no experience with chatbot development, but they still won the project because of how much effort they were willing to put in. They’re interested in trying new things and finding unique ways to sell more products or make them better, which is an invaluable asset in a partner.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should invest more in design. We’re probably one of the first companies that have asked them to do design work, and it’s gone quite well. However, it took some effort to get it started, and I don’t think it’s their strongest asset. At least, not yet. If they could build it up, though, it could benefit a lot of their clients.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

If possible, meet with them in person for kickoff meetings or to discuss new features. You’ll get more out of it than a phone call. If that’s not possible, invest in collaboration tools that make communication as direct and easy as possible.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the digital products manager of a private health insurance company with 1.5 million customers. I’m responsible for strategy and projects, which includes our native mobile applications.

What challenge were you trying to address with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions?

We were looking to develop a healthcare app. Security is paramount in this field and it was one of our biggest requirements.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cleverlance is our partner for developing native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. The healthcare app they built gives access to user profiles and health records. The main features are only accessible to our customers, but it can also be used by other people for accessing topics of interest like working hours, emergency information, and so on.

We continue to add new features every three months with their team. We go through a debugging process every two to four weeks as well.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with an Android developer, an iOS developer, a project manager, and with some testers from their team. They add more resources if we need to deliver a feature faster, though typically, we have a small, agile team from their side. As far as I know, Cleverlance is quite a large company.

How did you come to work with Cleverlance Enterprise Solutions?

We found them through a combination of networking and looking at references. We ran a proposal process with eight contenders, reviewing each one for security and their ability to work with our core system developers.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have an ongoing collaboration. We started working with them in February 2013. The iOS version of the app was launched in August of that year, followed by the Android version in February 2014. The Windows Phone version was released in 2014 as well. There were different important updates done throughout this timeline.

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

The app was awarded a national IT prize in 2014, which was a first for a healthcare app. Thanks to that, we’ve come to be considered one of the biggest innovators in our local healthcare market.

How did Cleverlance perform from a project management standpoint?

We are in contact with them almost every day. They’ve pushed us to be agiler and conduct frequent standup meetings without having us tear away from waterfall software development. The platform wasn’t very complex to begin with, but their focus on agile development proved useful from our perspective.

We have our own Slack channel for communication and use Confluence as a knowledge and product specifications repository. We use Jira boards to track tasks and issues and conduct a backward evaluation after each sprint. We also use Google Play Console and iOS Console for assessing the app in terms of speed and crash rates. I would give Cleverlance a four out of five in these areas. Being the best would require a bit more from them, but they’re one of the top developers in their region.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I haven’t had prolonged experience with other development teams, so I can’t fully compare them. I’m always hesitant to use words like “impressive”, but I appreciate the fact that they can leverage expertise from other teams and projects within the company.

Cleverlance is also a security-focused company, and they’ve worked on large banking projects within Europe. This is helpful for solving problems regarding login and maintaining server security, especially because we lacked this expertise.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I haven’t identified anything lacking in their performance.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Development companies are typically not very experienced in terms of UX and design. As far as I know, Cleverlance has improved a lot in this area by hiring some great designers. I would still advise clients to focus on this topic and check the company’s research methods, UX process, and so on.

When putting out our request for proposal, we were looking not only for developers but also UI/UX designers. Throughout the process, we realized that it would be preferable to have separate requests, one for development and one for design.