How We Work

It’s not just about hiring the best people, treating them well, and continually raising the bar; it’s also about building solid, long-term, mutually profitable relationships and being able to measure productivity and the relationship.  ExtensionEngine (EE) has built a successful and mutually-profitable model around these commitments.  We also believe in the critical need to build a strong foundation of trust and understanding.  EE teams work hard to make clients our client-partners, to become genuine members of the teams they work with and to hold everyone in the team accountable for progress, success and the relationship.

That makes us cautious of the work we take on.  EE doesn’t often accept straight “project work” or short-term development projects unless we believe there’s a longer-term possibility to follow.  Our objective is to work with companies who need to build or augment their teams and who appreciate the virtual turnkey “plug and play” increase in productivity that ExtensionEngine gives them.

That also makes ExtensionEngine not just a technological advantage, but a human resource strategy and asset too because EE absorbs all the employee, management and overhead expenditures our client-partners would otherwise have.  So an EE team is an investment that we make and build together with our client-partners.  And we produce tangible evidence of improvement and productivity gains which show our client-partners that the value of that investment is measurably growing.

We put maximum value on our teams’ abilities to become key contributing components of their US company counterparts and on our efforts to provide a level of comfort to our client-partners that is equivalent to having the EE team is right downstairs.  We insist on a foundation of and high standards around communications and interpersonal relationships early in the life of the project; we also set a high bar on detailed and meaningful knowledge transfer that comes only with direct interaction and personal encounters where knowledge, capabilities, personalities, and commitments are visible not verbal.  Near the beginning of any engagement, EE teams have in-person orientations with the client-partners and team members and spend sufficient time with them to become enmeshed in the technology and products, the team, individual contributors, and corporate and cultural nuances.

The result is a strong relational foundation which serves as an outstanding platform for the more remote exchanges and transactions that take place when everyone goes back to their own desks - in Croatia in the US or elsewhere.  That’s when the distance of off-shoring becomes more of an advantage.  Daylight savings depending, Croatia is five or six hours ahead of the East Coast, effectively increasing the man-hours in a given workday.  Telephone, email, regularly scheduled conference calls, Skype, IM, emerging technologies, and daily and weekly communications and reporting infrastructures support constant and seamless communicating and team-building efforts.