ColoredCow Consulting

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Founder of Project Tech4Dev, a collaborative of software companies, funders, and NGOs building and deploying open-source software solutions across the social sector.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire ColoredCow Consulting, and what were your goals?

ColoredCow is a valuable partner with Project Tech4Dev. Specifically, ColoredCow is a founding member of Glific - an open-source two- way communication platform. We started this project with ColoredCow and a couple of other partners. ColoredCow played the lead role in product development and design of Glific.

They are also building and hosting a SaaS platform for Glific to enable NGOs to be up and running on the stack quickly.

SOLUTION

How did you select ColoredCow Consulting and what were the deciding factors?

We have a good list of our expectations from a software partner, and ColoredCow hit or exceeded most of those expectations. We wanted a team that had shown a commitment to building tools and deploying solutions to the social sector. We wanted a group that was not only using and building on open source,. but also being great community players and contributing back to open source.

We wanted the founders to share the philosophies that we wanted to share and propagate amongst the social sector in India and around the world

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

This project is a long term project and has been built jointly with ColoredCow. As such, we see ourselves as one project team rather than different teams. The scope of work started from a blank piece of paper, where we immersed ourselves in a set of new technologies that we were using for the project. We did user and competitor research, product feature set and specification, development and release of the product in an agile manner, and on-boarding of customers from month 3 of the project.

We operate in a super-lean, agile methodology, with tests and documentation being first-class citizens and aspects like continuous integration and continuous deployment being part of our workflow from the very beginning. To a large extent, we learned and grew up together over the past 9 months, and are not showing any signs of slowing down for the next few years :) Stack: * React + Apollo Server * Elixir + Absinthe + Oban * PostgresSQL

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

We started off with 3 people and now have 6 people from ColoredCow on the project. 1 senior frontend developer 1 senior backend developer 1 senior product designer 1 senior product evangelist 1 mid backend developer 1 mid frontend developer ColoredCow also puts a few of their team on the project that is not part of the budget, to help the team grow and learn

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In general an amazing team that goes above and beyond what is required of them. They've got a great open work culture and people are curious and want to learn more. We do weekly releases, and we need to ensure that our client base is happy.

We are online with our customers along with the entire team and if there are problems, we are all aware and more importantly, we work together to address and fix them.

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

ColoredCow is part of the team that follows an agile approach to software design, development, and deployment. We have daily standup calls to accommodate for time zones, one in the morning and one in the evening. We use technology to keep track of issues, feature requests, documentation, and more.

All in all, I do think we have a fairly nice and smooth system that is working well for us

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

* Great People * Great Attitude * Willing to work hard and push themselves outside the comfort zone * Willing to challenge assumptions

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

From a team perspective, all of us need to continue improving our skills and ensure we are using the latest technologies and tools in an efficient and smart manner

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Webicom Inc is an edtech company who is working towards building online education platforms for both 1-to-1 online education and group class setup as well. I am co-founder and technical expert at Webicom Inc.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire ColoredCow Consulting, and what were your goals?

We started with our first project WebMentor4You platform. It is a website and web application development work. Which went quite well and we are continuously working with ColoredCow on new features for this project. This project is already live. Other project we started is ClassroomO which is a education marketplace where tutors/institutes can create online entities and use our platform to manage all thier courses with online live classes. This project is also live now. We are working on new enhancements aggressively on this project. We want to be the one of a kind market place for educational institutes to give them ability to transform completely into hybrid model.

SOLUTION

How did you select ColoredCow Consulting and what were the deciding factors?

I knew ColoredCow from one of our software testing meetups. And I have seen the working style of the team and met core team few times as part of my software testing meetup. When I decided to start the project ColoredCow was my obvious choice as they are best at what they do.

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

Our website and webApp development process started with kickoff meeting and divided the project into milestones. All of the deliverables were executed effectively and in timely manner.

Our website and webApp uses following tech:

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Laravel
• Php
• Stripe and RazorPay payment gateways

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

At all times there were atleast 3 people working including 1 project manager and 2 developers. But there were times when more people were pulled in to meet the milestones.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of the measurable outcome is that our platforms are live and running. We have started with small set of users and working towards enhancing platforms to target more users.

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

We had weekly meeting to discuss previous weeks work and upcoming work for next week. We used github for code collaboration and google suite for docs, meetings etc. I liked the project management style of splitting the deliverables and set small goals to achieve. This worked well for us.

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

Open communication. We like the way each member of the team openly communicates and tells things to us upfront. This helped us planning and executing our end of tasks very well.

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

We had initial bugs on our lunch; but those were fixed quickly on priority basis. I would like ColoredCow to invest and focus more on software testing. And it is in general what i find most of consulting companies are lagging.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and managing director of a philanthropy organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ColoredCow Consulting?

We offer pro-bono consulting and toolbox services. In order to scale our program, we wanted to develop our own project management platform that would allow our team to manage the program and scale it.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

ColoredCow developed our website in 2018. In 2019, we worked with them on multiple platforms. These are largely database management systems that allow for data capture, easy analytics, and reporting. One of the platforms was used in terms of scaling our operation. We designed and conceptualized all the sites. ColoredCow currently helps with the maintenance of the project management platform. 

What is the team composition?

We work with a full-stack developer, a design person, and a backend developer.

How did you come to work with ColoredCow Consulting?

Their founder reached out to me on LinkedIn. I traveled to Delhi on a business trip, and we connected to understand what they were looking to do. It took 6–7 months to identify common ground because we are in different industries. We needed someone who understood the philanthropic sector requirements — especially for charities — because they often don’t have huge budgets.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2018 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

ColoredCow is a young team that’s very supportive, cooperative, and open to client feedback. They understand the primary function of any platform that we want to build and bring a lot of leanness to it. 

We like their work because it’s so clean and easy for our end-users to use. My team is completely satisfied with the portal that’s largely used by us. We’ve also gone on to build another project that is actually for the market, which is in the adoption stage.

How did ColoredCow Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

The governance is pretty well set. They follow timelines and make sure the prototyping and beta testing is done.

What did you find most impressive about them?

ColoredCow is good at building the websites, mobile apps, project management platform, membership platform, and CRM components that we need.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

The UI/UX is very essential and needs to be good. For any technology developer, the behavioral nudges are so important and determine the success of any mobile application of any product that they create.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You don’t want a product that is so heavy on features. They have a sense of just the right amount of content, the right kind of design, and the ease of navigation. We’re a satisfied partner.