Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
What is The ThreeWill Promise?
Our promise to our business sponsors:
- Control – We provide the structure for our clients to control priority of features and budget throughout the lifetime of the project.
- Choice – Because we deliver working software every two weeks, we earn our client’s business every two weeks.
- Commitment – We take on your challenges like they are our own; you will not find another business partner more committed to your success.
Internal Discussions
We’ve been discussing our brand promise often recently on our internal Yammer network. It’s a relatively new concept for us. I wanted to summarize what we really do for our business sponsors. Yes, we are technical and process experts in our given domain. but how does this ultimately translate over to benefits to our customers?
Control
The first promise is control. We want you to feel and be in control throughout the lifetime of the project. To do this, we need to provide structure. The way we do this is you own the priority of the features (what goes into the next Sprint) and you decide where the budget is spent (more about that in a minute). The feedback we get from many of our projects is that what is liked best is the process we use to structure the project. We typically get hired because of our technical acumen, but the reason we stick around is our execution of the process. In fact, sponsors like the experience so much that they want us to teach other projects on how to “do SCRUM.”
Choice
There are a couple of options on how we price projects. A majority are T&M with a budget cap. We have adopted a fundamental tenet of SCRUM, which is to deliver working software every two weeks. That means you can stop when you feel the product is ready. And yes, this does happen. Some opt not to use the remaining budget; others opt to use the budget on other projects that could use some attention. This means we earn your business every two weeks – because you are in a good state at the end of each Sprint. Note, especially for larger projects, there is a Transition Sprint – usually for 1 or 2 weeks to do appropriate training and transition of deliverables.
Commitment
Our last promise is commitment. Simply, when you hire us your challenges become ours. Take a minute to read some of the testimonials here. The only way we build this reputation is putting your needs in front of ours.
Making the Promises Real
We don’t want these promises to be just words on a website or a slide. As a part of ThreeWill, we need to hold each other accountable and call each other out if we aren’t true to a promise. As a customer, we want you to challenge us if we fall short of any of these promises. Iron sharpens iron.
Leave a Comment
If you’re a customer, we’d love to hear any experiences where you have seen the promises in play. Feel free to leave a comment below.
If you’re another ThreeWiller, I’d love to hear your words on what these promises mean to you. This would be great to supplement the page on what it’s like to be at ThreeWill.
If you’re a prospective customer, we’d love the opportunity to show you these promises in action. Reach out to us here.
5 Comments
Eric Bowden
Your challenges become ours: We intend to protect the investments you're making in technology.
We do this firstly by setting the right expectations for software that can be built within your constraints of schedule, budget, and resources. Next, we're making the best use of existing technology (e.g. SharePoint, Microsoft 365) and resources (e.g. you and your folks working alongside our team, as appropriate). We're carefully tracking progress, sprint by sprint, and our QA engineers ensure that features which appear to be complete, are indeed complete. We're always looking ahead to ensure the project is setup for a soft landing, no surprises.
Have any questions? Ask me here, email at [email protected] or Linked In at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbowden
dannyryan
Eric - I appreciate how passionate you are about this.
tommyryan
This promise has come from observations of what our customers like best about how we serve them. This is not something we have made up to look nice, but something that speaks from our hearts.
If you have not had the opportunity to have us help you on a project, we hope this give you a sense of what we are all about and a standard that we set to be evaluated against our true project performance.
Do promises like these resonate with you? Would love to get your thoughts on this.
Kirk Liemohn
Our process (control/choice) gives us a good environment to succeed on projects. The passion to make our clients happy and solve their problems (commitment) may be more intangible, but I it is something I have seen in every ThreeWiller (and I have been here a long time).
Gary Geurts
Our customers often praise our work as early as the proposal
phase of an engagement. Fully leveraging
Agile from the beginning, our proposal consists of a detailed product backlog
and a simple Statement of Work that references the product backlog. The details of the feature groups, user
stories and associated story points contained in the product backlog provide
our customers clarity of what is proposed, along with feature priorities and
the level of effort per user story, thus giving our customers both Control and
Choice. Our Commitment is evidenced
early on as well through this detailed approach.