Greenice

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of engineering for a patient communication platform. We send text messages, emails, and automated voice calls on behalf of our clients, which are large hospital systems.

What challenge were you trying to address with Greenice?

One of our prospective clients was interested in a consumer chat application. They needed to implement a chatbot app into their website that could transition into a live chat app, allowing them to chat directly with prospective customers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Greenice has helped us develop the app we needed for our client. Given that our entire infrastructure resides in AWS, they’ve used Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex to build the app, implementing the chatbot and live chat features we needed.

Currently, the app is in maintenance mode. Greenice has provided us with ongoing support, and they will help us add new features periodically.

What is the team composition?

Initially, we worked with four people from Greenice: two developers, a QA person, and a project manager. However, their team size has fluctuated from one developer to four developers at any given time, depending on the amount of work required for each month.

How did you come to work with Greenice?

I found Greenice on Google using three main keywords: chatbot, AWS, and consulting. We also reviewed other companies and technology options, but using Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex was the cheapest route we could take. Greenice was one of the first companies we talked to that had expertise in Amazon technologies, and we were very impressed with their knowledge and previous work.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $100,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had initial conversations in December 2020, started working together in January 2021, and our engagement has been ongoing since.

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

Thanks to Greenice’s work, we were able to release an MVP version of the product within four months. It was a very tight timeline, but their ability to scale their development team allowed us to meet the deadline.

How did Greenice perform from a project management standpoint?

Greenice’s project management has been very good. Having a dedicated project manager from the start has been very helpful. This person is very knowledgeable about our products and the features it needs, and they know how to test the various aspects of the platform.

Additionally, even though they’re from Ukraine, their English level is very good. Their accent is very easy to understand, and they’re great at following written technical instructions in English.

We have a Slack channel dedicated to our conversations about the project. Given that we’re in different time zones, we’ve established a great asynchronous method of communication; we post questions on this channel, and we get delayed responses the next day. However, we have a weekly meeting every Thursday to discuss the project. Additionally, we use a Jira board to track progress, and we go over any of the stories active on that Jira board during our weekly meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Greenice is excellent at understanding what products need to do, and they deliver that functionality. They’re also very knowledgeable in Amazon Lambda, Amazon Connect, Amazon Lex, AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and every other feature within the AWS environment. Furthermore, they have vast experience in React JavaScript, the technology we use for our website.

I haven’t worked with other developers to have a comparison point, but the general feedback I’ve heard from other people is that Greenice is one of the best development firms they’ve worked with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

On occasions, we’ve found regression bugs. Building a better regression test process would be helpful. However, it is hard to do it when moving as fast as we’ve moved. I know that they cut corners to meet the tight deadlines, which might be the reason why they didn’t have time to set up automated regression tests.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Set up a QA process external to Greenice’s one to add attention to detail and ensure that no mistakes are made.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the clinical director at The Listening Centre (EAP) Ltd. We provide B2B welfare services such as talking therapy, mediation, trauma support, and bespoke training.

What challenge were you trying to address with Greenice?

We needed a CRM portal for our business.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Greenice built a CRM portal for us from scratch. I gave them what I could to start with the product, and then we worked together to develop it essentially.

What is the team composition?

I was in contact with one project manager and a couple of the developers. Initially, Sergii (Founder) was involved too, and then he became less involved as time went on.

How did you come to work with Greenice?

We put a project proposal on Freelancer.com, and they found us. We then narrowed it down from nine to three potential vendors. After interviewing them, we chose Greenice based on their expertise, engagement, cost, and their examples of the work that they had done previously.

How much have you invested in them?

We ended up spending £14,000–£15,000 (approximately $18,800–$20,100 USD) with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from June 2017–June 2018. We still have a maintenance contract with them, so when we want to upgrade, update, or amend anything, they help us with that.

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

They did what we asked them to do because our system worked and did exactly what we needed — users find it very easy to navigate and user-friendly.

How did Greenice perform from a project management standpoint?

They mostly wanted to talk with us on Trello, an excellent project management platform. They also tried to track every piece of communication, so we were forced to use written communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I had never done a project like this before; it was a unique experience. Everything went well once the owner got involved and understood what we do and the severity and importance of getting it right. I liked that they worked hard to understand what the problems were and solve them correctly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Technically they are brilliant at what they do; however, I think the language barrier did cause many problems. Also, the project manager left in the middle of the process, and then they had a temporary project manager who didn’t know what she was doing, which caused many problems.

I think talking on the phone or doing more Zoom calls would be something that would help. There was a little bit of misunderstanding, and things were lost in translation, so if they want to work in an English-speaking market, they need to improve their English. It’s not a criticism; it’s an observation.

Overall, we have had a few bumps in the road, but they worked brilliantly once things were going well.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that the project manager understands the job and that you keep the flow of communication going. The project manager we have now with our maintenance contract is excellent because she understands what we want and is very efficient.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m vice president of an online home fitness program.

What challenge were you trying to address with Greenice?

We needed help with increasing our development capacity.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Greenice helps build our online fitness program, which is a web application built in PHP and React. Physical therapists can prescribe one of 10,000 fitness routines to their patients to do at home. Patients can access those routines through a patient-specific portal. 

Greenice is a part of our in-house dev team. We supply the designs and user stories in advance. They’ve built the search engine tool, database, program page, patient portal, and tracking specs. They also modified our API.

What is the team composition?

We work with 4–5 full-time developers and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Greenice?

One of our developers brought Greenice to our attention. After testing their competency, we found that they had good senior developers on their team. That’s why we chose them.

What is the status of this engagement? 

The project started in 2017 and is ongoing.

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

Greenice has done good work. I like working with their team. They’re available and professional, and they even tried to learn French to better communicate with me.

How did Greenice perform from a project management standpoint?

The team meets our requirements, budget, and timeline. They’re no worse than other providers I’ve worked with. We use Skype, Slack, emails, and Jira to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Greenice just delivers. They’re dedicated to their work. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I would like to get more developers, but they seem to struggle with increasing their capacity.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and general manager of a reviews site called NoCowboys. We mostly review tradespeople in New Zealand but have expanded into other services over time. Our team requests evidence of the actual engagement with the business to verify reviews and allow firms to respond.

What challenge were you trying to address with Greenice?

We had onsite IT specialists but their focus was too narrow; they weren’t able to support all of our segments. We wanted to outsource services to a partner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

After successfully completing test projects, Greenice became our outsourced IT provider. Their team addresses technical problems onsite but also manage development projects. They have rebuilt and migrated website features, writing new code. Our team built the platform’s database from scratch, which Greenice has linked with a new CRM that they continue to expand. We expect that within the next two years, we will have completely rebuilt the site with their team.

What is the team composition?

We communicate with a project manager directly. Our team has also collaborated with tech leads and developers. Since our partnership is in its third year, I’ve become familiar with many Greenice teammates including the owners of the company.

How did you come to work with Greenice?

We assessed different search methods for finding outsourced developers. Eventually, we came across Upwork where we found Greenice, which had reviews from past clients in different industries on their profile. We tested them and the engagement progressed from there.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $200,000–$999,999 with Greenice.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began collaborating in January 2017, and the engagement's ongoing.

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

Our main metric is that we continue to collaborate with Greenice as we upgrade and expand; that’s our vote of confidence for them. All the work they’ve done works.

How did Greenice perform from a project management standpoint?

Since day one, we’ve communicated with the same project manager who keeps the Greenice team on the ball and prioritizes tasks effectively. They’ve been excellent.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The entire Greenice team is eager to get involved. Everyone’s willing to roll up their sleeves to make the project work, which I like. They work on a level playing field; there doesn’t seem to be an elite group at the top.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The Greenice team learns quickly from any errors. There’s always something that can be improved, which is a cooperative process. The only weakness we’ve encountered is team turnover. Developers tend to move on to more complicated projects as they grow.  The transition between teammates can be difficult. They’ve implemented a system where developers who have worked on our website but become tech leads remain available to new team members. This has made a positive difference.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of Travelforce, an IT consultancy company based in Sweden. We develop our products that are tailored for the travel industry, but we also offer IT consultancy services for external clients.

For what projects/services did your company hire Greenice?

One of our clients wanted a remake of their existing website and for this, we needed to partner with an external agency to be able to accommodate the work in the specified timeframe. We partnered with Greenice on the backend side of things, namely integrating to our client's real estate broker system.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to create a better user experience and focus on performance, as well as eliminating current issues that existed on the old site. With this in mind, we came up with an architecture that Greenice then implemented.

How did you select this vendor?

We searched for consultants and agencies on Upwork, and I found Greenice to be very promising after a short interview. They seemed to be used to this type of work, and as a result of that, we could get started very quickly. Since then, Greenice has been a great partner for us.

Describe the project in detail.

Our designer did the re-design of the website, and coded it up. Greenice then took responsibility for integrating with the client's real estate broker system. We gave the team at Greenice a lot of freedom, with only some periodic reviewing from our side.

What was the team composition?

We have a more "senior" contact person that has been there from the start that is always available to answer questions. Then there is a dedicated account manager for the project that will answer questions and forward information to the developers. The account manager position has changed several times, which isn't ideal, but it hasn't been a major issue. We generally don't know how many people are working on the project, we just need time estimates and Greenice will work from that on their own.

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

The average page load time went from 2.7 seconds to 700ms due to the architecture revamp. The time taken for importing new estates into the website was reduced by 50 %. The stability of importing estates to the website was significantly improved with error rates dropping to almost zero.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Project managers are easy to work with, usually respond very quickly. When we have new tasks these are often accommodated the same day or the next day. Generally very happy with the responsiveness and quality of work.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their code quality has been very high. The team is very attentive and keen to adapt when concerns are raised. Overall very positive interactions with everyone on the Greenice team.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Sometimes some details are missed, not sure if it's a language issue, but there are times when we need to clarify and repeat parts of a task that haven't been completed.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a crowdsourcing website for architectural design projects, and I am the founder and CEO.

For what projects/services did your company hire Greenice?

Greenice implemented the entire modern website. From the client upload funnel to designer interactions to the payment system, etc.

What were your goals for this project?

To create a solid and scalable platform for a B2C two-sided marketplace.

How did you select this vendor?

In 2015, we had the chance to have a 1-month testing period and gave the developers a particular task to evaluated their approach and coding, and from thereon still continue working with Greenice.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We had a basic site working, Greenice fully integrated and developed our platform into today's solid and scalable platform. Work includes backend and frontend development, and maintenance of the site.

What was the team composition?

We have one main head engineer and when needed more talent working on the tasks. What I love about Greenice is that it is a larger team and hence flexible, when we needed more talent it was easy to plug in new people from their team to develop tasks at hand.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Greenice was the best thing that happened to us. They have an immense work ethic and professionalism. I am not sure if we would at the point where we are without Greenice and their team. I would recommend Greenice to any company looking for solid work in this area.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We have weekly sprints, where we discuss tasks. This was very effective. We also use some project management tools that are super effective in understanding where things are, what tasks are worked on, etc.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their work ethic and professionalism. They changed their location, had people come and go over the years but still kept the same professionalism. We never had any situation to complain on anything. That is amazing and pretty impressive, given we are working with them now for 4 years!

Are there any areas for improvement?

The people at Greenice know exactly what they are doing.