Animus Bytes

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

FFX produce custom Antenna solutions and provides R&D for specialist electronic and RF solutions. I am a Co Owner

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Animus Bytes Ltd, and what were your goals?

For what projects/services did your company hire Animus Bytes, and what were your goals? The Company needed a complete website update from a basic holding page to something that accurately reflected the Company and its products. Our goals were to achieve the following: A website that was more innovative than our competition. It needed to be accessible from PC, Tablet and smartphone Give us a detailed understanding of where the visitors came from and which sections they focused on. A secure site that would allow us to implement a customer specific area in the future.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors? The team at Animus Bytes were recommended to us. Of the three companies we spoke to all of them were enthusiastic and skilled. Animus took the time to understand our needs, researched our competitors and gave us a detailed proposal which included a clear plan.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The proposal was used as the basis to develop and agree the project deliverables. A weekly project meeting was used to steer the development, when a decision was required outside of the project meeting it was clearly articulated and the relative merits discussed. The Animus team guided us through the hosting and software options, developing concepts when required to support the decision making process. React.js, bespoke Animus content management system.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with a two person team, a project manager and a Lead Developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project was a short 4 week effort which was delivered in time to launch the site ahead of a major event. The project achieved all of the goals with only minor modifications required since launch

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

At our request Animus Bytes used email and Slack for routine correspondence and Asana for project tracking although they were willing to adopt any number of systems. They attended all meetings, responded quickly both in normal working hours and outside. They set up a GitHub so that we could access the code being produced, established a pre-production web site that was reviewed in the regular project progress meetings.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The personal touch. They really got to know and understand the Company and its products to make sure that what was being developed was an excellent fit. For the short duration of the contract the Animus Bytes team became part of the Company, I wouldn’t hesitate to bring them back in for future development work and updates.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Having been through the process once there are some small things that we would collectively do differently but nothing that could have been predicted beforehand by the Animus Bytes team. They were constantly checking that we were satisfied with the product and the progress.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of Oasisairbridge, a company which helps countries emerging from conflict (and developing countries) develop their airspace to return civil aviation

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Animus Bytes, and what were your goals?

To design and develop a website which will be the key marketing tool, into countries it is difficult to travel to and from, to help get our capability to market.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Recommendation

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Myself and my COO described loosely what we wanted and provided some technical language related to our product and left the web designer to do propose a website to us including the look, feel, graphics, pictures and user interface.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

One individual

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our organisation is supported by four well known companies who's capability was to be advertised on our companies web site, advertising themselves as our partners. When the partners saw the website when 80% complete, they were all very complimentary. The web site looked very professional and this helped our partners have confidence in our abilities.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We provided a short brief of what we wanted and the result was far better than we could have imagined. My COO engaged with the Web designer on a weekly basis.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Professionalism, quality of work, timeliness and nothing was too much trouble. Of most note was their ability to take the initiative in designing the web -site; having the ability to relate the shape and feel of the web site to the product we are trying to sell.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

CyberVector Ltd specialises in contract R&D in mathematics, information science, physics and engineering. We develop a range of algorithms, software and hardware prototypes.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Animus Bytes, and what were your goals?

As part of a project receiving part funding from Innovate UK, we needed to stand up a web site that would enable us to undertake some market research. The web site needed to be able to present a range of "explainer" material from articles, images and video. To maximise the reach of the research we needed this to be accessible from PC, tablet and smartphone.

Behind the web site there are hooks to some very elaborate analytics. So that office staff could maintain and add content, we also required a web based Content Management System that could be used to draft, review approve and publish new content as well as curate and maintain existing content. This was all successfully undertaken by Animus Bytes.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

The team at Animus Bytes were recommended to us. The two factors that nailed their involvement were; they showed enormous enthusiasm from our very first (pre-contract) engagements, and they really knew what they were talking about with obvious experience, skill and talent.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They immediately worked with us in detail to scope the requirement, making excellent suggestions that we would never have though of. They proposed a MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) stack which placed everything in the cloud with a range of buy-when-you-need hosting options. Within two days they had produced a straw-man prototype which we could assess and they were highly responsive to our suggestions.

We had at least project progress meetings per week and they were highly interactive and informative. The creative process was highly engaging with great creative tension, and on the odd occasion where there were creative differences the Animus guys made their cases well and they won us over on all but one occasion. Within a couple of weeks we have a pre-publication final review version which was tweaked and went live well before the original delivery date that we had requested.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were probably two people, but mostly the Creative Architect was our go-to point of contact. He clearly had a very hands-on role behind the scenes.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The advanced analytics behind the site now show which aspects of the site are most interesting. The dwell time, and corresponding browse down history enable us to measure which aspects of our Market Research have the greatest relevance. The analysis of returning visitors also provides us with data that we can analyse and we can begin to pose new questions, such as, "are people coming back regularly because they anticipate finding something new and relevant?"

The web site is highly versatile and the associated Content Management System that was produced enables my people to draft, edit, review, approve and publish material that can be highly reactive to the information obtained from the analytics.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Animus Byte set up GitHub, Netlify and Trello so that we can see prototype JavaScript (MERN Stack) code being produced, we could see pre-production web site published and accessible from PC, tablet and smartphone and we could review these "live" in the regular project progress meetings. The Trello board showed us what they were working on and that activities were being created, assigned, delivered, reviewed and approved as the project progressed.

We could contribute to the Trello board, and we could see how code in GitHub transitioned from dev to pre-prod to prod. Their management style was friendly but firm and we certainly knew when it was us that was holding up their progress. They were always fair.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

You could go to much bigger companies and not find the two factors that were most impressive for us; they showed enormous enthusiasm from our very first (pre-contract) engagements, and they really knew what they were talking about with obvious experience, skill and talent. The clearly believed in what we were trying to get from the web site, showed genuine interest in our project, and were a constant source of affirmative energy. We now wouldn't go anywhere else for this type of website.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We were clear that the web site needed to be managed and maintained by our in-house team. None of us are familiar with MERN and JavaScript. Some better documentation, for example about how to get the best from Netlify or how to decide whether to transfer to Heroku and then how to do that, would have been helpful and welcomed. We'll continue to put projects to Animus Byte, but we need to manage the BAU ourselves, and documentation is key to that.