UI Dev Projects for IT Services Consultancy Firm
- UX/UI Design
- $50,000 to $199,999
- July 2016 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 4.5
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"I believe they really care about our team."
- Other industries
- Austin, Texas
- 51-200 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Do IT Programming Solutions conducts frontend development initiatives to expedite the production of various software prototypes in a fast-paced outsourced engagement.
After providing integral assistance with several product launches and demos, Do IT Programming Solutions' broad expertise allows the team to explore new technologies in a cost-effective manner. Their structured coding and incredible price point continue to drive success.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the director of user experience for a consultancy based in Austin, Texas with locations across the US and Europe. We focus on business process management through building customer enterprise software solutions on a few different enterprise process orchestration platforms known as BPM.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Do IT Programming Solutions?
We wanted to be able to iterate quickly and cost-efficiently on various prototypes. Right now, we’re in a quickly changing technical landscape. Depending on the customer and the opportunity, we need the ability to build prototypes quickly. Those prototypes might be frontends for new technologies like different machine learning systems or frontends that are specific to a given domain. For example, if the customer is an insurance company, we’re looking to pitch a larger solution that will cover applying a certain new technology to their use case. We pursue a variety of different opportunities at the same time, and not all of them will pan out, but we want to put our best foot forward in terms of creating prototypes and demos that will look good in the RFP process.
Do IT builds our UI prototypes, so they’re supporting us in the frontend development. Our internal organization is more focused on providing products that we offer and offering support from production perspectives. Do IT has been working with a few of our people internally, primarily from our sales team.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
All of their work has been focused on UI development. We started by doing a little Angular development, which is a frontend framework, and then moved into some more specific frontend libraries like D3. Currently, they’ve been helping us build different prototypes on Service Now as well as Salesforce. We’ve used them specifically for UI and are potentially looking to use them for backend work, but we haven’t gotten there yet.
How many resources have been assigned to your project?
Right now, we just have 2 resources. We had up to 5 at once. In total, we worked with 7 or 8 of their developers, along with the 2 principals, Oilex and Nikita.
How did you come to work with Do IT Programming Solutions?
We found them on Upwork. We tried working with different teams. In the past, I’d worked quite a bit with outsourcing organizations in different geographies and struggled with some that were located in India, but we had more success with China-based firms. We have a few folks on the team now that have worked on similar technology, and they actually live in the US but are from Ukraine. We started looking at that geography and exploring different organizations that could support us. We tried interacting with individuals at first, thinking about potentially building a team. We eventually tried a few companies and found Do IT.
I like our interaction with Nikita, who’s a principal there. He comes across as less of a sales person and more of an advisor, which is refreshing compared to some of the other experiences I’ve had. I believe they really care about our team. They shared some marketing materials with us as far as their training perspective, and I appreciated that.
How much have you invested with Do IT Programming Solutions?
We’ve spent $120,000 so far with them.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in July of 2016, and the work is ongoing.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?
Our general sale cycles are about a year in length. Everything we start investing in from a sales perspective takes a very long time, and the deals are generally worth millions of dollars or more. We launched a product recently that they helped with significantly. Part of our organization in Europe is deploying that product with a few customers there.
From a qualitative perspective, Do IT has helped us start producing demos and sales assets using technologies that we didn’t have the time for ourselves. Things like Service Now and Salesforce are not major components of our business or BPM software, so from an investment perspective, being able to start building know-how in those areas in order to get deals is expensive because we have to hire full-time resources in the US who are experts in these domains. With Do IT’s expertise in these technologies, we’ve been actually able to get small sales gigs before needing to invest in full-time resources in that domain. That’s allowed us to explore technologies at a very low cost from an investment perspective.
How did Do IT Programming Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?
Since the team included up to 5 people at the peak, we’ve handled the project management. They provided more team leadership. Our first interactions with Nikita and the way he helped us pick the best resources indicated that they’d excel. We just haven’t quite grown to need that many resources to justify moving project management to their office.
We primary communicate through Skype. We’ve also been using our project management software called Rally, which is now CA. They’d never used it before and were happy to figure it out, and they got pretty productive with it. Our Scrum masters break down the user stories and assign them. Do IT broke those items down into tasks and actually worked on them.
What did you find most impressive about Do IT Programming Solutions?
I’ve worked with a lot of outsourcing firms that come across as body shops. Do IT tried to create their own culture. When I’m interacting with people on the team, I never feel like they’re there just to put in the hours. They care about doing a good job for their company. That was refreshing. They also have little recruitment videos and things like that to explain the organization’s uniqueness. I think that’s beneficial from a productivity perspective as well.
Are there any areas Do IT Programming Solutions could improve?
Sometimes, the engineers’ skill set wasn’t completely aligned with the team. They could provide a more structured way for breaking down what each individual does. On Upwork, they have different ratings based on different exams illustrating how competent they are in different areas. It sounds like Do IT is actually doing some of that internally. They actually do testing specific to JavaScript or a given framework, but that doesn’t come across in some of the information that they presented about their resources. This only happened once or twice, and I was able to correct it pretty quickly and find another person to fit the role. If they offered more information as far as what each individual excels at and what kind of credentials that person has, I think the setup process would be a bit smoother.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
"We were really impressed with the quality of their code. It was well structured, and they even provided comments, which I didn’t expect or ask for."
-
Schedule
4.5On time / deadlines
"Some people are just better at estimating than others. I think a few people were better at estimates and actually completed work before the deadlines they provided. On average, it worked out well."
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"After comparing them to other geographies or other folks in Ukraine, I think they’re a great value."
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I really enjoy our collaboration and certainly praise them whenever I can.
