Innowise Group

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a digital agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with Innowise Group?

We needed a partner who could provide resources for some of our development projects.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Innowise Group helped us with a few of our projects working on front- and backend development. The technology stack used was PHP, JavaScript, and Node.js.

What is the team composition?

We work with four different team members from Innowise Group.

How did you come to work with Innowise Group?

A friend recommended them to us.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested €20,000 (approximately $25,000).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Innowise Group in February 2020 and the engagement is ongoing.

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

The developers are easy to communicate with, and we are extremely satisfied with the quality of their work. 

How did Innowise Group perform from a project management standpoint?

We handle project management most of the time. Overall, they communicate well and are transparent in showing us their code. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re skilled programmers who integrate well into our workplace. They are able to quickly scale up when necessary.

Are there any areas they could improve?

In some instances, there is difficulty contacting them, but overall, it’s good.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

In general, I recommend having some internal developers and IT staff.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a software development company that creates apps for long-distance hiking. I’m the COO and the general council.

What challenge were you trying to address with Innowise Group?

We had a project that we didn’t have the internal resources to complete in the time frame we wanted. We engaged with Innowise to help us finish that project.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They completed a branding component in our app that they built for iOS. We gave the developer detailed specifications and they grew the feature from the ground up. He’s written the entire thing. The project is wrapping up now but we’ve decided to engage with them on a web application in the near future.

What is the team composition?

We hired a developer and a full-time QA professional.

How did you come to work with Innowise Group?

I found them via a cold-contact through LinkedIn from one of their representatives.

One of their business development representatives was accommodating and available. They also had a huge team that could provide pretty much everything we needed.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $45,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2020, and our work is ongoing.

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

They got the job done well. The QA work has been outstanding and helped moved the project along. The development has been high quality, too.

How did Innowise Group perform from a project management standpoint?

We managed the project on our end. We communicated via Slack and Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The breadth of experience that they have stands out. Whatever you need to be done, they can do it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Communication is key. They’re always there to communicate with you. Don’t be shy about asking a lot of questions.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Trumpet provides software and business process consulting services for the financial, legal and healthcare markets. I am one of the founders, and have extensive technical experience.

For what projects/services did your company hire Innowise Group?

One of our internal applications (Java, Spring, JPA) is used for license management, invoicing and billing. We had a single developer working on this project, and needed to increase the release cadence so we could get features added more quickly. We also wanted a new perspective on the code base, recommendations for leveraging 3rd party libraries, etc...

What were your goals for this project?

To decrease the cycle time for enhancement implementations from 2 months to 1 week while increasing code quality.

How did you select this vendor?

Innowise reached out to us initially. After several phone calls with Innowise - including interviewing the developer we would be working with

• I spoke with 3 of Innowise's current clients that were of similar size and scope to us. We then scoped a very tight project and let them work. This proved out their ability to work with our version control system, and gave us a chance to evaluate their speed and code quality. The results of that test project were exceptional
• super quick turnaround, very, very clean code
• plus a willingness to push to improve things (not just do what we told them to).
• Finally, we scoped a full project enhancing our LMS software - but we selected a project that was fairly surgical so they only needed to deeply understand two or three sub-systems to be successful. Since then, we've added more and more projects, which have increased the scope of their understanding of the various sub-systems. At this point, Innowise understands about 95% of the code base.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Innowise is now a partner in our sprint planning-we create specifications for upcoming enhancements and invite them to comment. We then maintain a shared prioritized work queue (using Trello) for specs that don't have further questions. Innowise works off that queue and delivers new functionality each week. This work has included everything from re-writing our PayPal merchant services interaction library (which was 10 years old) using modern development approaches to adding additional REST endpoints, to implementing a PDF templating system.

What was the team composition?

• Customer Operations manager
• Product Owner
• myself
• Innowise developer
• Project Manager 
• Innowise PM (primarily helping with balancing scheduling at Innowise
• I do most of the in-project PM work as the Product Owner)

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

New functionality is being added weekly (instead of taking months). Our Operations group recieves the enhancements they need to work faster. We are being exposed to new libraries and ideas of how to solve the development challenges. This enables our Operations group to become much more innovative, and we are implementing efficiency enhancements at a record rate.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We use a combination of google docs for writing product specs, and Trello to manage priorities and communicate which enhancements are being worked on, ready for code review, ready for deploy. This has been very, very effective. We also use Slack for more rapid communication when the developer has questions for the product owner.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their willingness to work with our processes and systems - but to also provide recommendations. All of our communication has been friendly, professional and solution oriented. Overall, the speed with which they deliver quality code is wonderful.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Initially, there were a few times when we asked for changes that are outside the developers skill set. The developer reached out to us after the fact to let us know that while he was able to get things working, it would be a lot more efficient if we included another member of the Innowise team who specialized in HTML/CSS/Javascript. So we are evaluating that right now. We have to explicitly ask for unit tests to be created. Once requested, they do a good job with building the tests - they just don't have a TDD instinct. This is fine - we just needed to start including test requirements in our specifications.