Enterprise Risk-Management Solution
“Hotovo has been an integral part of the product development and the success of the application. It’s a partnership. It’s really not a typical outsourcing arrangement.”
Peter Walker, Chief Technology Officer of The Protecht Group
Protecht is a major Australian company that uses its risk-management software solutions to help organizations deeply understand, monitor and manage their risk.
Protecht was originally looking to extend its development team with highly skilled personnel at a manageable cost.Since this was extremely difficult to do locally and with a long-term perspective in mind, Protecht decided to look off-shore for these additional resources, stability and reliability.
We stepped in to provide Protecht with a dedicated and long-term agile development team, based in Slovakia. Hotovo was entrusted with the development of Protecht’s core products and tackled the issue of product quality and insufficient requirement specification by extending the Slovak-based development team to include a proxy product owner. As our successful partnership took off, the responsibilities of the Slovak team slowly started to increase, to include tasks such as analysis of customer requirements, processing of change requests, definition of technical architecture and design – with the final approvals done on the Protecht side.
Gradually, the Slovak team then also took charge of the development of new features as well as the support and maintenance of the current product releases.
An increasing demand for mobile-device use by Protecht's clients then led to the establishment of a new sub-team specifically focused on the development of a native mobile application on iOS and Android.
Hotovo was also in charge of hiring additional outside personnel, whom they assigned to the migration of certain front-end libraries.
With regards to managing information security, Protecht is ISO 27001 certified. Hotovo therefore polished its own internal processes and successfully passed the certification for ISO 27001 as well, to provide support for its European customers with the same standard as Protecht.
This small team has since grown to include more than 30 members, working not only on development but also on product architecture, testing/QA, DevOps, support and BI/reporting. Hotovo was also tasked with formalizing Protecht’s development and product management processes.
- Hotovo was able to provide Protecht with the skilled development team they needed, at a significantly lower cost than had they hired the same local team in Sydney.
- Today client's development is greatly accelerated by Hotovo’s 35 person team.
- Hotovo started regular sync meetings between the product owner and proxy, who then distributed work and clarified requirements.
- Hotovo created clear specifications and a straight development process with predictable outcomes and quality
- Hotovo implemented a formal testing process, which included reports, a growing set of properly defined test cases and test automation
- Hotovo introduced a proper Scrum methodology, which is constantly adjusted and fine-tuned to the specific needs of Protecht
