Cogneti Training Video Mobile Application Gamification
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Mobile App Development
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Enterprise Mobile App Development Android App Development iPhone iOS App Development Productivity Mobile App Development
- $50,000 to $199,999
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"Narola represented a competency to implement the native players and apps for iPhone and Android."
- Other industries
- Boston, Massachusetts
- 1-10 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Narola Infotech, as an outsource partner, provided web services, database configuration, software design and implementation services for Android and iOS mobile platforms.
Narola Infotech proved to be experts in Android development by delivering quality work that received positive feedback from the management. Although the team did not adapt to the American hours, they are still highly recommended for their flexibility and competent approach on the project.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company.
The company is Cogneti LLC, which provides a service by which small companies or organizations that describe themselves as workgroups can convert their training materials to be played as an activity using mobile devices. We represent a number of workgroups. The intention is to reduce the cost of training. They do training that is familiar to people who are on their feet while they work as opposed to being on a computer. The whole vision is to bring your own device, whether they work in a restaurant, in an oil field, warehouse, or retail. If you have a lot of people who don’t have computers, but they need training, we take that training and turn it into a game. The idea and vision behind the game is that people should be better motivated and engaged by gamification principles to participate and feel the value of the training. That is also an experience shared with others.
What is your role and responsibilities?
Founder and primary owner.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What was your goal for working with Narola Infotech?
We have a number of software components that we have to build, such as Web services, databases, and other software design goals and implementation goals. With Narola, we were looking to complement our existing skill set. We are a very small organization, and we’re bootstrapping the firm. We are paying for it all out of my own funds and other investors. We wanted to reduce the cost. Narola represented a competency to implement the native players and apps for iPhone and Android, which is why we hired them.
SOLUTION
Please describe the scope of their work.
What I like most about Narola is that they represented the engagement with me with competent professionals, people that had the skill sets we needed. They were familiar with the Android.
What was your process for selecting Narola Infotech?
We put a bid on Guru, Elance, and a few others. My CTO is also an equity holder and founder of Cogneti. He is from southern India, from the Tamil region. He started his career in the Boston area with me. He has a much more technical background than I do. I moved into project management. He did the interviews and talked to people.
Our history is one where we've had to go through iterations, and we’ve wasted money, maybe $100,000, working with a couple of people. To be able to say no to someone and change things is so expensive. By the time you’ve developed a fairly long program, you’re invested. They know your product and to say no and do something else, is such an expensive process. We had to do that two or three times until we found people that we really liked, and that we knew were giving us something at an effective exchange, with price and effort.
Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?
It was efficient, and we got some good work done. I feel our project was fairly ambitious. We worked with them for about a year, with two and a half people on and off. We probably spent $50,000 to $60,000. We spent more than that with people who didn’t do a good job for us. It was a very competitive price, even though I felt they were a mature organization. They had good scheduling. They had good flexibility with us.
I ended up wiring funds to them and asked to be billed on an hourly basis. They didn’t ask for a lot of protection. I ended up feeling that I could trust them, and they felt they could trust me. That’s valuable, to feel that kind of trust, which allows so much flexibility. Many people are worried about getting money up front and being paid at benchmarks, and all of those protections. That ultimately hurts you. It makes a relationship less flexible, and with less flexibility comes less opportunity to do things efficiently, for both parties. When you get that good faith and match that good faith, it's a great thing.
When was the latest milestone completed for that work?
October of 2013.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?
There aren’t really stats for this type of project.
Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?
They were familiar with Android development, and not just in the technical way that they knew how to implement the software. They were able to engage with me. I don’t speak Hindi or any of the other local languages. They were able to communicate with me.
The other thing I liked about Narola was that, even though they managed the project fairly well and allowed me flexibility, they also allowed me to communicate directly to the developers. We got to know them very well and work with them. We had daily scrums, which I wanted. I felt that I could keep costs down by very tightly and artfully managing the description of requirements. That is so critical in getting the project right.
I was able to follow it through in a closely managed way. I am sure that Narola doesn’t work with all of their customers that way, but I asked for it. I’ve been in IT my whole life, and I know the nature of development projects. The way you do it efficiently is to create requirements in very well defined ways with lots of graphics and very carefully defined parameters, and they would implement them. I asked for that flexibility, and they gave it to me.
A lot of other providers want to get in the way, in a way to protect themselves by requiring that we go through a particular process, then they take it through their project managers. Then, they manage communications, but that is not the case here. I am positive that I saved a lot of money by working that way, by matching their needs against my skill set. I didn’t have to fit into a cookie cutter mold. They adapted themselves to what I was good at and complemented what our organization was good with their competencies. That takes some flexibility because everybody is going to go into a company like Narola with their own set of complementary skills. The best thing is to match it with the best fit. They allowed that, and I was delighted with them.
Narola also complimented us with the testing. We didn’t have good testing, so I told them we would put the testing together. They were great. They also always delivered what they said they would deliver, which is wonderful. They were very good.
Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?
Some things you don’t see because you end up patching it occurred. We worked with them fairly narrowly, and we have three people with a lot of background. We're veterans in the industry. We knew how to present and create documentation. They said that we gave them more detail, down to the renderings of every single page than any other client did. We gave them very complete Web service definitions and UI [user interface] definitions, everything was well detailed. I liked that they didn’t challenge it and took what we gave them. They were flexible.
I never asked them for something that they didn’t do because I asked them carefully. If there was a downside to our relationship, they didn’t adjust their times to match our time zone. A lot of people will work on a U.S. daily calendar; they worked on an Indian IST [Indian Standard Time] daily calendar. That’s fine. That would have been good if they had.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"We helped them be on time by using iterative development, with very short-term projections."
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"We did hourly billing."
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I already recommend them.
