DICEUS

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company provides an insurance policy administration platform to brokers. I was a product manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We were developing the prototype of an insurance management product. We wanted to do it quickly and at low cost.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Diceus developed our web application using PHP, HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap. The app is a general-purpose online quotation and sales solution for insurance products. It was a simple product that we wanted to develop quickly.

What was the team composition?

They assigned a project manager. I can’t remember much interaction with the developers, so the process was quite efficient. I gave Diceus a general assignment and they made a rudimentary specification; I wasn’t hassled about the project too much after that.

With other outsourcing companies and more sophisticated projects, we want to work directly with the developers. This project was so easy that we didn’t need to.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We were referred to them, and they stood out because of their efficient communication. We were quick to set everything up and start the work. Cost was another factor. Diceus was more expensive than developers in Belarus, where we’ve done a lot of work, but they had competitive pricing.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost was around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Diceus around November 2016. The project took around six weeks to complete. We've been talking to Diceus about other projects. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We've provided the prototype to B2B customers, who have sold it to their own customers. We presented the solution to customers and explained how we intended to turn it into a more complex solution. Several big customers currently use a solution derived from Diceus' software in their sales process. It's being used in many countries, including New Zealand. 

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed well on this project. We didn't use any project tracking tools. I know they use Jira, but since the current project was quite simple, we didn't need it.

What did you find most impressive about them?

You can find proper development skills in many former U.S.S.R. countries, like Ukraine and Belarus, but Diceus' professional communication stood out. They were great at tracking the project and creating offers and contracts. They're among the best at project management and business communication.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder and CEO of a company that specializes in database services and cloud database regulation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

I needed a company that could help me develop some products. We're a professional services company and we needed to use a partner that specialized in development. I haven’t worked with too many service providers, given that we are service providers ourselves. However, in this case, we needed some help from a professional outsourcing company.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They've provided development services, mainly for products around the database space. We work with technologies like Java and AngularJS, depending on the project.

We have a new project coming up soon and I believe that we will increase the development team on their end.

What is the team composition?

I have my own managers working with the team from Diceus. We also have a team that handles some of the development processes. We have a project manager as well as development, QA, and UI teams on their side. We work directly with every team member, but there is a full-time, dedicated project manager who helps us manage all the tasks.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

I traveled to Ukraine and met several companies—at least five or six. I initially started working with another company, but I was disappointed with the quality of their work. Diceus was my second choice. We started to work with them and I’ve been happy with the results.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their work will be around $500,000 during our first year. It could be a little more, depending on our upcoming projects.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them around November 2017. The collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve received good feedback for the work so far. We have the ability to check code and perform reviews from our side. So far, it looks like Diceus is doing a very good job. I have nothing bad to say about them, but I don’t have any metrics to share.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

We're working with them on a daily basis and using some tools for project management. They're based in Ukraine, so we’ve had to adjust ourselves to their time zone, but they do great work. We had to take time to understand their culture and everything else, but they've been responsive and we can trust them. After we decide on the timeline and sprints, they work according to those. The performance has been pretty good—we're satisfied with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The response time is one of the most important factors for me, along with flexibility, even outside normal working hours. We're in the U.S., they're in Ukraine, and we also have a team in the Middle East, so we need to work across different global time zones. With Diceus, I haven’t felt that I needed to check their work every hour. They are responsible, they appreciate the work, and it’s important for them to maintain long-term engagements. Whenever we have had an issue, they solved it quickly.

We have only been working with them for less than a year, but they’ve done a good job so far. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’re happy with the results up to now.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The biggest problem in working with Ukrainian teams—and something we perceived with our previous company—is communication. Once we found a good way to communicate, we were able to solve most of our issues. It’s not easy to communicate in English—especially for companies in Russia or Ukraine—but we found that Diceus was able to understand us. We could involve their CEO in discussions around strategy.

The previous company we tried to work with was absolutely horrible. They didn’t understand us, even though they kept saying yes to us. This hasn’t happened with Diceus. It took us at least a month to get to know each other and understand their capabilities and pace, but I feel very comfortable working with them.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

U.S. companies working with providers from these countries should make sure that there is a close collaboration during the onboarding process, in order to ensure the partner understand what is being built. Things will work smoothly after a month or two, but the onboarding process takes time. If one person doesn’t understand the client well, it can affect the whole team. We have to be particular in selecting resources, perhaps through interviews. I found that Diceus’ team was able to understand us and that they found the right people.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO of a tech company that provides software solutions to dentists. We’re located in Estonia and Norway and we develop systems that help dentists keep records of their patients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We had a visual prototype that we tested in Norway and Estonia, so we were looking for a company to handle the development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Diceus fine-tuned our prototype and started implementing it. Initially, we thought we needed only backend developers since we already had the visual prototype. Later, we realized that we also needed frontend developers and graphic designers. Diceus has a versatile team, so they handle UX/UI design and produce 2D images for us.

What is the team composition?

We mostly work with our project manager.

How did you come to work with them?

I posted a workable proposal on Upwork and they got in touch with me. After that, we went to Ukraine to meet with them. They seemed to be just the right size and they really wanted to work with us. Besides, they were very flexible, so we decided to give them a chance.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent about $75,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2018 and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have a functioning product, which we can test. It's work in progress and we're halfway through the project.

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

We have daily Skype calls and regular design sessions where we discuss the progress of the project. We also use Jira and GitHub for project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I appreciate that they're constantly learning new methods and platforms. Initially, they wanted to work with Photoshop, but they were able to switch to Adobe Illustrator and worked on improving their skills. I was impressed with their graphic design capabilities.

Are there any areas they could improve?

English is not their first language and some of their team members could improve their English-speaking skills.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be clear about your budget and your timeframe to avoid any misunderstanding.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Transactional Business Intelligence is a startup in Sydney, Australia. We built an application that connects online cloud accounting platforms like Xero and QuickBooks to give small-scale accountants and bookkeepers more transparency for their tax compliance obligations. I’m a co-founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We have experience developing software, but none of us are actual coders. We ran all the numbers and prepared the information before looking for a partner to help us build an MVP. We needed a financial app that would connect to an online accounting platform via an API.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped us write the code and did some of our design and UI work. The app runs a series of analytics, calculations, procedures, and visualizations on financial information and sales transactions. It allows users to instantly view their current tax obligations and requirements, including trends, variance, and proportional taxes. It also runs a series of automated tests that search for potential errors and incorrect conclusions.

Our previous tool was built for big businesses on a SQL stack. I wanted the new app to be a modern, online SaaS solution. We all agreed that our best option was a MEAN stack.

What is the team composition?

They had a project manager who also acted as a business analyst and QA lead. His English was proficient, so he translated my requirements for the developers and acted as the intermediary. We had two dedicated developers, one for frontend work and another for the backend. One week out of every month, we worked with a designer on concept screens before each sprint.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We sent an RFP to six different developers we found on Clutch. Diceus responded almost instantly, within a day. We interviewed their COO, marketing representative, and the lead they were proposing. They read the brief, came prepared to answer questions, and provided examples of similar work. No other team was as thorough, prepared, or impressive, so we decided to hire them.

How much have you invested with them?

There is one more invoice coming in, so we will ultimately spend between $92,000–$100,000 USD.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in November 2017. We are not quite finished with the MVP and are entering another revenue raising round at the moment. They are finishing a component, so we are a little behind.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The look and feel of the solution is very good. It exceeded my expectations from the very first session and they really captured what we wanted.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

We wanted to do two-week sprints, but ultimately went with a more progressive approach. We got updates every two or three days and discussed what would happen next. We moved from a more formalized sprint process to more fluid, rolling development.

We used InVision to do the concept design work and Jira as the main development repository and milestone tool. We did most of our rewrites in a shared Google document and entered all the code into Bitbucket.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were good at conceptualizing visuals that matched our needs. I gave a very loose description of my ideas and they made them look amazing on a screen. I’m also really impressed by their project manager. This was his first financial job, so he read about all the basics of accounting on his own. He got an understanding of general ledgers, subledgers, debit and credit accounting, and looked into how VAT worked. I was completely amazed by his drive to understand the domain. He was phenomenal.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Communication could have been better. After some inconsistencies in the code and problems with testing data on a large scale, we had to convince them to be more forthcoming. We pressured them for updates and finally reached the right level of interaction near the end. That was a bit of a hardship.

They also struggled with Xero and the API for our data culling. They took longer than they should have to get the tax calculations right in the app. If they had utilized Xero’s dedicated API team sooner, they would have saved time.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you set the right level of communication for your project.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Tektelic Communications supplies services to cellular and wireless technologies. We also develop and market a line of IoT, low-power, wide-area networking gear, specifically in the LoRaWAN ecosystem. I’m our VP of marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We wanted someone to redesign our website. Our business model has changed recently, and we are changing the products we sell. We wanted someone to help with a design that would reflect our newest marketing efforts, and an e-commerce site that would let us sell more gear online.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They redid our entire website in WordPress. They’ve also implemented our e-commerce site. It took a lot of effort to integrate the payment scheme, and we ended up using Stripe. We also encountered a bunch of issues with certifications and plugins. We’ve added plugins for FedEx and DHL transport, as well as a purchasing schema to accommodate the different tax regimens for each Canadian province we ship to. We’ve only launched one product so far, but will add more as we get certifications for them.

Other plugins include MailChimp, to allow people to sign up for our newsletter, plus a handful of other little customizations. The site itself is mobile responsive, and we’re doing our own SEO work. Right now, we’re in maintenance mode, and we’d like them to continue making incremental changes to the site.

What is the team composition?

We had a project manager, a technical project manager, and a business development person. We mostly worked with the project manager, who farmed out requirements to his team as they came in.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We found about 15 companies on Clutch, and sent them our high-level requirements document as an RFP. We got responses from about six or seven companies. We wanted to start an independent corroboration. Our choice to go with Diceus was twofold. They were responsive, and they indicated they could do the job within our budget. They had references from other companies in Ukraine, and our CEO was able to meet with them in Ukraine while we were still discussing an engagement with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $8,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2017. We broke the project into two phases. We launched the first part in November 2017, and we just wrapped up the e-commerce and plugin additions in late December 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re happy with the way the site works, and don’t foresee any major redesigns. We definitely hope to keep them engaged. Since we’ve worked with them, our Google rankings have improved. We’re working on accelerating our loading speeds, but that’s a different project.

From a usability perspective, we’ve captured leads more effectively because of the forms they’ve added. We know who’s viewing the website and downloading information, and the results are positive.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

They were phenomenal, topnotch. They were online 24/7. If I remembered something I needed or had an action request, I could email them and get at least an acknowledgement within an hour. If I caught them during their regular work hours, they’d set up a time to discuss next steps. They were well staffed in terms of client engagement, and we worked mostly from spreadsheets.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The entire engagement was very good. They provided a good breakdown of the effort, their estimates were detailed, and I have to give them kudos for their project management. They were very capable, and made sure we answered the right questions without being overbearing. They were polite, and sorted the critical pieces to keep the project from running behind.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think if anything. I’ve done this sort of thing three times with different companies, and these guys have done a very good job.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Know what backend plugins you want before you get started, and tell them what you want. They’re super good at implementing them, and they’re the company you want if you need a strong team and a quick turnaround on a site, especially in terms of content and e-commerce.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a Scandinavian company that I started 11 years ago. We have a 10-person team, half for development and half for selling our solution, which targets a niche within insurance and claims handling. Our typical clients are self-insured entities. They are usually captives — large companies which set up their own insurance entities, instead of using traditional insurers. They use our software solution for handling their risks and claims, even though it’s their own money they are claiming back. They need a tool to administer the process, and this is where we come in.

Most of our clients are in Scandinavia, but we are trying to get a foothold in the US since the market there is gigantic, especially when it comes to captives. They have a completely different culture, so it doesn’t take a huge company to make creating a captive feasible. Having been in the market for many years and having clients who are using our system globally, we thought we had a proof of concept to contribute to the US market and started in that area. We have a few clients and some sales resources in the region, but everything is still growing out of Scandinavia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

Until this year, we had in-house developers doing everything. We started 10 years ago with a Windows solution, which is still the only product we are selling, but more recently we also started working in-house on a cloud solution. I am limited on internal resources, and they struggle to manage their time between the Windows solution and keeping on track developing a cloud version. I decided to outsource the development of the latter, which is why I contacted Diceus.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started out building two modules in the cloud solution, replicating what we already had in Windows, but focusing on two main functions which would enable us to start migrating US clients. It was all about rating insurance products and administering claims on them. It’s a flexible solution by which clients can tailor their own products with the rating engine behind them, and issue policies in order to receive and administer claims on the same insurance product.

We don’t have any integrations yet, but we will be integrating with financial systems within the new year. When offering invoicing on top of these insurance products, the next step would be for the system owner (the person who buys the system and hooks into it) to hook in with whatever they have in the backend as a financial system, for example, QuickBooks. The aim is for invoices to flow automatically into the system in which they typically get their financial stream of payments so that they can match payments automatically with invoices. Hopefully, the next step of integration will be for payments going back to our solution.

From the start, we specified that we needed ASP.NET development, and Diceus suggested that we use ASP.NET Core so it would be more transparent for me — the platform running the code didn’t need to be Windows. I appreciated this suggestion since I hadn’t known about .NET Core previously.

What is the team dynamic?

Diceus’ team has typically provided full stack development, but I am the type of person who wants to be in control of the bottom layer. This is my fourth time building a system for this trade. I’ve been in the business for 20 years and have specialized in insurance-related software. I know exactly what I want when it comes to functionality and data structures, so the split between me and Diceus is that I provide the data architecture features, and they program up against a black box. If I was not happy with them, I could swap them out with another development company at any time, since I am in full control of what goes on beneath the 2 top layers of the solution. It took a little while for them to get used to that way of working since I might be too specific when it comes to what I want and how it should look, but, after a while, it became better and better.

This is not a huge project; we only have 2 developers. They’ve consistently been the same resources from the start.

We use Skype and email for communication, and I went to their office when we started up to have brainstorming sessions on functionalities. Most of the time, we communicate electronically about specific parameters.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

Being in the trade we are in, we get all sorts of prompts from different providers, many of them from outsourcing companies in India or Eastern Europe. Diceus came across as one of the more serious ones. Diceus reached me at a point when I was starting to warm up to the idea of outsourcing development, so I remembered the contact. The fact that they had experience with solutions for the insurance world made a difference. They had references in Scandinavia and might have been looking for similar prospects.

In spring of 2017, I created a description of our product and my intentions in building a cloud solution. We had a Skype meeting and discussed my criteria, and they came across as a professional option. Diceus connected me with a developer to discuss the issues more specifically. He was proactive in terms of technology and methods, pinpointing issues in my demands. This was the main reason for selecting Diceus. Their CEO, Illia Pinchuk, controlled the initial discussions, quoting, and analysis in a very serious way, which gave me the impression that they were not only skillful developers, but when it came to communication, he would be able to allocate the right people.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of two developers over the last seven months was $60,000–$70,000. We are invoiced monthly. Compared to our in-house resources, it is a good value for the money.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Diceus in May 2017. We will launch the cloud solution at the beginning of 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We introduced the quoting part of the system to existing clients, including two US ones, who are eager to migrate to the new system as soon as all the functionalities of the old Windows solution are covered on the new one.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

They assigned an experienced project manager from the start. He was replaced because he was too busy with another project. The new manager is more dedicated to our work, which I see as an improvement. Both were easy to communicate with and skillful in English. Some of the developers aren’t fluent in English (especially spoken), so it’s nice to have the project manager as a bridge between developers and us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I like that they are not afraid to suggest alternative designs. I am specific about what I want, but that may not always be the best way of doing things. When it comes to designing the frontend, I like their proactive approach. If Diceus’ team thinks that my way of crafting a user interface is not ideal, they will confront me with an alternative. They don’t simply take what I give them and run with it if there is a better way. They might not always be correct, but it’s a nice approach overall.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve their language skills. I have had to communicate directly with developers, and wish their language skills were better. I have a project manager in-between most of the time, who can help out if communication becomes a problem. This is normal, but it could be better. Apart from this, I’m a happy client.

There have been a few unpleasant surprises with some releases, but they don’t have the same options to validate their work like they normally would to check the data going in and out given our coding approach. I have handicapped them when it comes to testing, so it’s my own fault.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Nextcom is a Norwegian CRM provider. I am the head of development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We needed help with integration tasks. We are a small company, with few developers available internally.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

In the beginning, we had a single task for Diceus. They performed well, so we continued working with their team, hiring two developers on a fulltime basis for two projects. We mostly use them for .NET development.

One of our functionalities is two-way synchronization between our CRM and SugarCRM, which are both large systems, with more than 1,200 tables on which information can be entered, for order processing, customer information and so on. It was a large task, but Diceus performed well, and the synchronization is up-and-running for many of our customers.

They have also completed a large integration with a large ERP for a German client. They have a modular product hierarchy with no fixed product IDs which we could import into our system; everything is built using separate modules which are selected by salespeople. The customer wanted an integration with this backend system, which would automatically update our product register, as well as perform different calculations around distances between telephone centrals. If someone is closer than 2,000 meters to a central, they can obtain a certain speed, compared to being 5,000 meters away, and so on. The whole product integration is 100% dynamic, meaning that our customers don’t have to maintain product registers in two different places. The system submits orders back-and-forth, and connects to our backend in order to check statuses and make updates according to their own system.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We went through a process of finding a company that could work on our task, and with which we could potentially create a partnership. We posted a job on Freelancer(.com), but the task wasn’t properly described, so we received replies from 100 Indian companies which offered to deliver exactly as we wanted, but there were also two companies which mentioned that the task description was wrong. One of them was Diceus. We chose them for the task after multiple calls with Diceus and the other development firm. We didn’t want to choose a company which simply charged us hours for bad work, but one which actually understood what we wanted, and which wanted to do a good job. Diceus was suited for this task, and they included extra features in the integration, which we hadn’t thought of in the beginning.

How much have you invested with Diceus?

The cost of Diceus’ work has been between $50,000 and $150,000 annually. We are currently using three developers, who are up-to-date with our systems. Two of them are working on a fulltime basis, and the third is kept on standby, for when we have extra tasks to execute.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Diceus in 2012 or 2013.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

There’s not much I could provide in this sense, since many of our clients aren’t publicly-known. The combined number of people using Diceus’ integrations is around 2,000 per day.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

In the beginning, I was working a lot with Diceus’ project manager, but we haven’t needed to do this lately. The developers understand our requirements very well, so we can assign them documentation directly. They know our system, and can develop what we need.

Diceus has been mostly on time. In the beginning, our developers’ English levels weren’t very good, which led to mistakes in the communication, but it’s become much better over time.

What did you find most impressive about Diceus?

One of the good benefits for us, as a small company performing a lot of work with few employees, has been their team’s ability to understand tasks on their own. We don’t have a lot of time to describe tasks thoroughly, and Diceus has not taken up much of our time. I’m very happy with the relationship.

Are there any areas Diceus could improve?

Not at the moment. Diceus is working well on our current tasks.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Teambase is a Dubai-based solutions provider. I am the managing director of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We needed help building one of our cloud products. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Diceus is working as an outsourced provider for our company on the product development side as well as on project execution. We’ve worked with Diceus on two products, one of which is a cloud-based solution for the insurance industry, specifically brokerage. The other is a cloud-based HR package. Diceus has provided development power, both on the backend and the frontend, and quality assurance. The product management is done on our side.

In terms of language and platform selection, we’ve been focused on the Microsoft Stack: C#, ASP.NET, and Azure. There wasn’t a lot of expertise in terms of cloud implementations in 2011 since the field was not very developed. But, as our collaboration grew, Diceus has become more mature. We have been working together with them on this journey and have been fairly aligned in terms of capabilities from the beginning.

We execute project-related work for clients, and Diceus has provided coding, QA, and project management resources on this side as well.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We found them through a recommendation. We were a relatively small company and were looking for someone who could provide cost-effective, good-quality solutions. We worked with Diceus on an initial trial basis, and the collaboration grew from there.

How much have you invested with Diceus?

The cost of Diceus’ work will be in the range of $500,000 for 2017. We’ve been working with them for a number of years, and the involvement started fairly slow since we didn’t have as much work at the time. On average, we’ve grown the relationship by 20%–25% per year. The workload does tend to fluctuate, but our biggest growth has been in the last three years.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Diceus in February of 2011.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

I can’t share any specific figures. But, especially on the product side, we’ve mainly relied on Diceus, out of the three vendors we’re using. They have certainly contributed to our growth, and I’m happy with the collaboration. In terms of delivery quality, communication, cost, and all other remaining factors, we’re happy with Diceus. Like any relationship, there are a few glitches here and there, but the partnership is working very well.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re fairly effective on this front. We primarily handle the product side, but Diceus does execute a couple of project-related tasks, and I’ve been happy for the most part. In terms of project management methodology, we’ve basically provided Diceus with our framework. They adopted it fully, at least as far as our projects were concerned. Everything from meetings to timesheets and project summaries is managed on our end. Diceus has been able to adopt our approach quickly. In terms of the timeliness of their response, we’ve never had any issues.

Especially when outsourcing to a third-party, we’re always a bit nervous, and we did have an initial handholding period of nine months. After that, we were able to take a step back and have Diceus take the lead, directly communicating with the client.

What did you find most impressive about Diceus?

My overall feedback for Diceus is very positive. They’re a good provider, and the company is still young and hungry. As such, it can be very accommodating and easy to work with them. In a previous capacity, I’ve worked with several outsourced players; by comparison, the experience with Diceus is very agile and nimble.

Are there any areas Diceus could improve?

Some of Diceus’ members could improve their communication skills. This is not a huge concern for us since we tend to communicate with the team through their leads. Their English communication is good, but not as good as it could be. I’m sure that Diceus is working on that.

We’ve been working with Diceus for a long time, and we’ve managed to iron out the majority of our issues. We pass each other feedback, and I’m happy with them. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We build property casualty insurance administration systems. I am the CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

I needed overflow capacity for some internal projects that were ongoing inside our company. My internal development team is very dedicated to our primary product, BriteCore. Diceus helped me develop an administrative application that allows me to effectively produce cash flow forecasts.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Diceus built a cash flow projection application for budgeting. I asked them to build it using our team’s technology stack. They had to learn how to use Python, Flask, and AWS deployment from scratch. We also did monitoring and logging through CloudWatch and CloudTrail. They’ve done a great job of picking all the up very quickly.

I started out with a graphic designer and a programmer. Then, as we made our way past the initial screen concepts, I was working with a single programmer.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

Since I run a software company, I get daily emails from outsourcing firms that want to do work for me. I normally delete them, but I have a standard response that I send back asking the would-be contracting firm to complete an engineering code challenge that we have posted publicly on GitHub. No one ever follows through, but the Diceus team accepted the challenge and completed it to prove their abilities and commitment to a partnership. They did a great job which showed a lot of initiative and I really appreciated that.

How much have you invested with Diceus?

We’ve paid $40,000 for their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started 6 months ago.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

My engineers provided a ballpark for how many hours they thought the project would take internally. I was looking at an [internal] estimate in the $100,000 range, but Diceus is likely to wrap the project up for around $60,000. That’s a huge win for a small business.

Much more impressive than the cost however, was their ability to learn our tool stack. Prior to this engagement, Diceus’ online portfolio and resume stuff was all .NET. They were mostly a Microsoft shop, but we’re open-source guys using Python and other languages. I told them, “I would love to give you a shot, but I need you to work in my toolset. If I ever have to take this project back to my internal staff, I want it to be in a stack in a framework that we’re familiar with.” They took the time on their end to become familiar with our environment, our programming languages, our design patterns and did so at an impressive pace. A month or so after our initial engagement, they were pretty much up to speed enough that they could move forward with the project at a rate that I am pleased with. That’s another huge success story. They were willing to learn a totally new technology stack, workflow patterns, and tools that they were not familiar with.

Despite the time difference between my home state of Missouri and their location in the Ukraine, they have been great about being available when I have time during my business day. That was one of my major concerns, working with a team that was remotely located many time zones away. Their flexibility is a third impressive factor in our engagement.

How did Diceus perform from a project management standpoint?

I served as the business analyst/project manager for the project. I’ve asked them to use all of my toolset which they’ve readily done. We utilize Slack in our company for internal messaging and they have participated there actively. They have required ongoing direction as any project does, but they have responded positively to all of my feedback.

What did you find most impressive Diceus?

One of the biggest challenges in the project is that I did not want them to utilize a standard SQL database for storage. In the budgeting app, we established budget categories by month and there are baselines that you can project forward and things like that. Instead of storing each of those records in a database table, I wanted them to utilize DataFrames through the Pandas library. Using Pandas, we can perform ETL [Extract-Transform-Load] and data transformation easily, but it requires the adoption of new paradigms. No one inside of Diceus had used Pandas before, but they deployed the environment and my data model that I articulated very, very well. Not only did they learn a new tool, but they deployed that tool in the way that I asked them to. That’s something that’s not very easy to do.

Are there any areas Diceus could improve?

This is something we’ve already worked out with them. At the very beginning I was driving the entire process and that required a lot of my time; I’m a busy CEO. I had a sit-down conversation with them about 2 months in and said, “We need new processes for communicating here.” They were very responsive to that and established new processes.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company is a developer of value-added software solutions for SQL Server. We cover the needs of both database developers and DBAs [database administrators] with our products. I am the operations manager. I cooperate with all of our product development teams to ensure that we have protocols and systems in place to continuously prospect the market's needs, to plan new product roadmaps, develop products efficiently, and ship them out to production. I have been with the company for almost 10 years.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Diceus?

We needed to augment our product development velocity with help from external resources. We were looking for a company or team that can provide holistic software solutions for our product requirements.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have cooperated with Diceus on several projects so far – the latest one being complete front-end/user interface development for one of our products. Our developers prepared requirements and functional specifications while Diceus provided a solution that we can utilize within our product quickly.

How did you come to work with Diceus?

We cooperate with multiple external software development companies and teams. However, Diceus is our largest provider so far. We selected Diceus for a larger and more complex project. Previously, we did a trial run with them using smaller projects where they were able to finish them ahead of schedule while meeting all our requirements.

How much have you invested with Diceus?

The latest mentioned project budget is about $53,000. We're unsure about the exact manpower on the Diceus side as they are providing us with complete turnkey project management, and they are assigning new resources for each new project we spinoff. Our budget for all Diceus projects in the past 12 months was more than $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in April of last year [2015]. The latest mentioned project started in late August or early September of this year and will be finished in December. We are currently on schedule, and Diceus is meeting all agreed milestones.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

That is not applicable because we utilize solutions provided by Diceus only as parts of our larger, proprietary products.

What did you find most impressive about Diceus?

The number one reason why we keep coming back to Diceus is their dedication to delivering on or ahead of schedule, which is very rare in software development.

Are there any areas Diceus could improve?

They could improve the accuracy of initial project estimates by dedicating more time to estimating the projects up ahead and asking more questions to clarify uncertainties.