EromAgency

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Chief Technical Officer of Cirdan Capital, a finance service company specialised in the issuance of structured products.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We hired EromAgency to redesign our website, which had been built a few years earlier, when we are still a startup. We wanted a better website, with a design more appropriate to our new consolidated image in the finance industry, and more functional and dynamic, as the previous website was mainly static.

SOLUTION

How did you select EromAgency and what were the deciding factors?

We evaluated various vendors with various criteria: design quality, technological awareness, efficiency of their process, flexibility to adapt to changing requirements, responsiveness, and cost. EromAgency seemed to tick all the boxes since the beginning, we short listed them and they came on top.

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

We divided the work in three major phases. The first phase was focused on designing the content presentation and the navigation of our new website. EromAgency gave us a flexible solution based on a content management system built on the top of the Symfony PHP framework.

The solution was based on a set of flexible building blocks (sort of web controls) which could be assembled to make up a web page. They also set up the pages we would have launched to give practical examples on how to use such building blocks.

The second phase was focused on branding and restyling. Although EromAgency initially designed our new branding and implemented the related proposed style in the initial version of the database, around the same time we hired a marketing consultant who had contact with several branding agencies.

He decided to commission the branding to one of his previous suppliers. EromAgency worked efficiently and in close collaboration with the selected branding agency to deliver a very attractive redesigned and restyled website.

The final phase was more functional: we commissioned EromAgency the development of a “client area” to provide our registered clients a set of client tools such as financial calculators, self-service financial product builders and financial product webpages exposing useful information to our customers.

This solution was a dynamic extension to the relatively static CMS orientated content of our website. We provided EromAgency with our APIs, which supply all the content and functionality, and they built an Angular user interface which hook into them. The website was deployed on AWS cloud.

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

The EromAgency team we worked with included 4 people: a product / project manager, a graphical designer, a front-end developer and a CMS / framework developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We had a hard deadline only for the second phase of our project (launch of a redesigned and rebranded website) and we hit it. We completed earlier than the deadline and this allowed us to ask many senior members of our company to review the entire website and provide suggestions for improvements before the launch.

EromAgency quickly implemented the necessary modifications, so the live deployment completed smoothly.

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

EromAgency have a very open communication approach. They shared their JIRA with us from the very beginning and were willing to have direct communication between their team members and ours.

Initially, especially during the early design stages, we preferred to have less direct communication (mainly through their project manager), but towards the end of the project, when we focused mainly on the details we preferred to switch to more direct communication with their specialists. Each of EromAgency team member was very flexible with our requests and very responsive with the related answers and solutions.

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

I believe EromAgency was truly committed to high-quality delivery, both from an aesthetic point of view and in terms of quality of their code. I have also appreciated their frankness throughout the project.

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

Perhaps we should have better clarified expectations at both sides after the completion of the main project. We requested additional pieces of work and, although the quality was as good as usual, we had some mutual misunderstandings on the urgency. However, after a conversation, we agreed it was in the interest of both parties to start a maintenance programme which guaranteed expected SLAs.