Fishtank Consulting

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior ITS manager of Bow Valley College. We offer a range of credit and non-credit programs and continuing education opportunities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Fishtank Consulting?

We were revamping our website and had brought in an IT subcontractor to make it happen. However, the vendor put us in a really bad spot, and we needed help refactoring their work to make our deadlines.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Fishtank Consulting took over our project, transforming our legacy application into a Sitecore XP product. Their team started by assessing where we were at in our code and then making an eight-week plan to get us to where we needed to be. They designed an entire e-commerce platform from scratch to enable online registration for our continuing education courses. It had to integrate with several legacy systems in our stack, making it a complicated process. They also implemented Coveo Search and create the infrastructure, hosting, and virtual machine set-ups we needed.

Once the initial project finished, we put out an RFP for a vendor to support our Sitecore instances. Fishtank Consulting won the RFP and has become our vendor on retainer. We now have an arrangement for 1,000 hours of support and enhancement work. They’re also working on our Internet deployment at the moment.

What is the team composition?

We work with four people. Dan (President & Sitecore MVP, Fishtank Consulting) and Nathan (Former Director of Business Development, Fishtank Consulting) have been my main points of contact.

How did you come to work with Fishtank Consulting?

Nathan cold-called the CIO of every company in our region that uses Sitecore. He reached out to my boss who discussed our situation—that our site couldn’t go live because of its technical issues—and Fishtank Consulting swooped in to do a rescue job.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $300,000–$350,000 CAD (approximately $227,000–$265,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2017. The initial project lasted abought eight weeks, but Fishtank Consulting has been on retainer with us as a support partner ever since.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Without Fishtank Consulting’s help, our website would have been delayed by a good 3–6 months. They saved us from a failed project by developing the most complex part of the solution and getting us over the line. 

Since its relaunch, our website has seen more traffic. Usage of our search engine—an enterprise-grade solution that Fishtank Consulting helped implement—has grown by 500% because it’s so much more effective to use. We haven’t had any problems with the website caused by their configuration work. Some staff members on our side have caused issues, but Fishtank Consulting helps restore the site as quickly as possible when that happens.

Dan has also taught our staff how to use the products. He’s led some “art of the possible” presentations that have spurred new business.

How did Fishtank Consulting perform from a project management standpoint?

Fishtank Consulting has done a much better job at project management and communication recently. In our initial engagement, they only had technical mangers, not project managers. In the past year, they’ve brought on formal project managers, methodology, and a business development team. Their project managers match our project managers in terms of quality and communication levels. 

We now receive regular status reports for each stream of work. We get PDF documents for each breakout and communicate through Microsoft teams.

What did you find most impressive about them?

As a Sitecore MVP, Dan brings in a level of Sitecore and Coveo knowledge that we haven’t seen elsewhere. He’s willing to come in and explain new technologies and needs in our platform to our less tech-savvy team members. He does a better job than our IT department at explaining to our broader team the next steps for our platform and generating excitement about Sitecore projects.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If you asked me this question a year ago, I would’ve said that Fishtank Consulting could improve its project management. Since then, however, any issues we’ve had have come from our side. We tend to start and stop projects. Fishtank Consulting has been very patient with us, but since they’re a smaller organization, they don’t always have resources available when we suddenly restart a project. That is completely understandable, though.

Any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you’re assigned a project manager. Bring in Dan to talk to your team about what’s possible with the platform.