Info Services

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder and CEO of a software company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We offer digital employees, based on Agentic AI technologies, to enterprises of all sizes as collaborative team members working across the organisation in critical job roles.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Info Services to accomplish?

• Product Demos
• Minimum Viable Product
• Product Launch
• Product Revenue

SOLUTION

How did you find Info Services?

Referral

Why did you select Info Services over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Info Services were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

I hired InfoServices as my development team to turn the product vision and technical vision into a full fledged product.  Initially this meant the creaton of product demos, and proof of concepts to show to customers and create market interest.  The plan then involved moving onto the creation of a Minimal Viable Product across a number of AI Agents, we had originally targeted three agents to be defined as the objective of our first six months.  Naturaly the MVP is followed by a product launch for each of the three AI Agents, and the rapid evolution of features to meet the market and build revenue up to a minimum point of being able to cover the ongoing costs of operations - essentially for each product to become economically viable.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Creation of Product Demos (DONE).

Demonstrations to Key Customer Prospects (DONE).

Creaton of MVPs for the 3x AI Agents (1x DONE, 2x WIP).

Launch of Product for the 3x AI Agents (1x DONE, 2x WIP).

Creation of Revenue Stream (WIP)

Scale Up of Revenue to Meet Operating Cost (WIP).

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

We are working in an Agile Framework.  The overall team culture is highly collaborative, and engaged.  Project management has been equally collaborative, and has encouraged, necessarily, an environment of continuous learning and trying new things.  In the spirit of the Agile Method, the project management has been adept at shifting focus and shifting priorities to steer towards the eventual goal of launching the companies first product and achieving a revenue stream.  I am concerned that the project management style of engagement has not prioritiesed estimation of effort by work products, and as such planning timelines have been more guesswork - this has led to some minor missing of deadlines, and a need for the team to work long hours and even very late / overnight evenings to catch up against deadlines that are messed.  I have provided feedback that estimatation of efforts need to be priorities - for a number of reasons, but including the ability to plan deadlines bottom up in addition to top down, the ability to offer the team a work culture that doesn't involved late nights and heroic efforts to catch up, and the ability to identify simplification approaches earlier in the the process.  Overall I am very pleased with the project management of the engagement, and I believe the team culture and passion for this project is set up for success - the team seems to be having fun, and seems to well engaged in the mission of creating a new product, I sense they feel the excitement of being part of a startup.

What was your primary form of communication with Info Services?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

They came recommended by someone I trust and have worked with successfuly for a number of years previously.  Beyond this starting point of trust, the leadership of the organization seems to really understand the mission and passion of what I want to create - they were able to pivot in their thinking from "delivring a project" to "building a product."  While this pivot was a super strong challenge for all the other competitors I had evaluated, InfoServices convinced me the most through the process that they understood the mission this way.  In addiiton, during the proposal and evaluation stage, they essentially built things to show me rather than writing beautiful documents that told me what they were going to do -- this "show don't tell" approach was very impressive and unique.  Combined with the referral, this made my decsion easy to choose them.

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

As mentioned before, increasing the prioritization of rapidly estimating efforts on micro-work-packages would help smooth out the planning and work process.

In addition, their is a constant nudge or reminder the team needs to stay aligned with this being a "product" not a "project", and to lean into the new world of AI and steer away from an "Application Centric" view of the past.

There is also a need to re-energise for the "Product Revenue" phase - the team is in it's comfort zone in building the product, and found excitment and passion for the first launch, and similarly displays the same energy for the second product launch.  They need to turn some enery and passion into the next phase of creating revenue - e.g. the product launch is a key milestone, but not the end game...happy revenue generating profitable customers are!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Chief of Staff, Product Technology Solutions of an information technology company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Provides machine health monitoring solutions to manufacturing facilities 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Info Services to accomplish?

• augmenting our engineering staff for product development
• assisting with the implementation of Salesforce

SOLUTION

How did you find Info Services?

CTO Recommended

Why did you select Info Services over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Info Services were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

As part of our augmented staff, we have a team of people from Info Services who assist with the development of our mobile app solution for iOS and Android platforms, conduct mobile UX/UI, integration development, analytics and machine learning model development, automation and manual testing of our web and mobile platforms, technical writing, and project/contractor resource management.
We have another team through Info Services who was hired to help us implement Salesforce separately.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

For our augmented staff, we had multiple initiatives tied to our roadmap that we had to hit alongside our full time employees. These included the launch of our first mobile app and multiple milestones of functionality thereafter, integration solutions for general use, and machine learning development and deployment.

For the Salesforce project, milestones included 2 MVP iterations to deploy initial services to our Sales & Marketing team and additional follow on services after.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

From the augmented staff side, we have a Project Manager who works closely with me to monitor contractor performance and culture fit with our team. She provides status updates on work completed by each group, works with me to develop or replace resources as needed, and helps me keep a pulse on things across the projects we're working on.
On the Salesforce side, the same Project Manager assists that team but from a more traditional Project Management perspective, maintaining projected timelines and deliverables, providing status updates on behalf of the team, etc.

What was your primary form of communication with Info Services?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Info Services has been able to provide various resources in various disciplines to address our staffing needs. 

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

For our augemented staff team, it feels like we get either a rockstar or a disappointment with regards to resources and because we have a difficult onboarding experience with our products and tech stack, it takes us awhile until we know which type of worker we've found. For the rockstars we've had, we are very pleased with their engagement with our teams, products, and vision and we would not have achieved what we have with out them. For the other half, it has caused many headaches with my full time staff expressing displeasure and frustration, work has had to be redone multiple times, and there are questions about how engaged some of the contractors are with our work.

On the Salesforce side, I'm not as closely involved but know that the team is very disappointed in the contractors assigned to that project and have voiced frustrations and concerns, especially after we missed key deadlines that ended up incurring additional costs due to poor communication between the contractors and our full time staff.