OYKOS DEVELOPMENT

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a co-founder of the web development agency. We are a team of experts that specializes in the Web and Mobile Development as well as System Engineering. We believe we are a reliable digital partner for almost anything related to software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We have been working on a platform for online education and we needed more resources than we had inhouse. Oykos was our partner which helped us meet the deadlines and deliver the product.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We have been working before together on a couple smaller projects and we knew they will be a reliable partner so this was a quite simple process.

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

The project's goal was to be a one-stop-shop solution for digitizing education processes. Aimed for both public and private education institutions its purpose was to make work easier for owners, directors, managers and mentors in the educational institutions, and especially for the students.

We started by going through the product backlog, groomed it together and created a roadmap for the project. We benefited from their approach of planning and prioritizing tasks and we marked important milestones by which we agreed to pay them.

During these first meetings we discussed the tech stack and landed on PHP + Laravel for the back-end, mainly because we internally had resources which could help in development, testing and code review in this tech stack. On front end we've chosen ReactJS. Once we finished our initial planning meetings, they created a technical documentation, based on out requirements, and development kicked-off.

During the development we used Agile methodologies and had bi-weekly demo meetings. Here we could focus on main point of interests and follow how milestones are achieved, ask questions to dev team and direct the priority of further task for development. There were 3 main phases of this project, including many different modules:

1. Admin dashboard: Part of the product used by owners and directors of education institution, which aims to provide the full control over the application's contents, plan, user accounts, access permissions, shared file system etc.
2. Mentor dashboard: Part of the application used by mentors which aims to centralize and simplify creating the course content, lessons, tasks, set grades for task solutions, schedule lessons etc.
3. Students dashboard: Part of the product used by students, which allows them to have full access to lessons' contents, chat with group members, solve tasks and questionnaires etc. Oykos Development developed a CI/CD pipeline using Github actions and Docker for both front end and back end applications.

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

Vendor's team had initially a team of 3 people, which participated in the brainstorming phase. There was a project manager, team lead and ux/ui designer. Later they added two back-end engineers for Laravel, and two front-end engineer for ReactJS.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

As a general feedback, I could say that we are very happy with the transparency and fair play this team showed. Even if they didn't deliver 100% of agreed things every sprint they were transparent and determined to achieve milestones on time. Altogether - a very positive experience.

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

Project owner was on our side and he had daily check-ins with their project manager, who communicated with the rest of their team. We also had demo meetings every other week. In regard to tools and services we used, the list is very common: Slack, Jira, GitHub... In general, communication was very good.

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

They were easy to work and communicated with. We are in the same time zone and speaking the same language. Beside this, reliability is the factor we appreciated the most.

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

I'm sure there is always something that could be improved. Having the overall impression totally positive, I wouldn't focus on a minorities.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am head of the IT department in the Judicial Council of Montenegro. We run a Judicial information system, which is a centralized information system for all courts in our country (1600 users in 25 locations).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We managed finances in the old system and HR records, inventory of items and procurement manually. OYKOS DEVELOPMENT is building the new information system to cover all of the processes in those fields.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Procurement procedure by the law. They had the best offer.

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

First step is to do detail business analysis with the users from finances, procurements, etc. Since we described technological platform in the ToR (Kubernetes, Docker, Golang - back, JS/TS - front), they 100% complied with that. Second phase is realization phase, where we expect to get information system described in analysis, ready for testing. Last phase is to implement this system, train users and go to the production phase.

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

We have worked with 7 people, but we expect more in the next phase: 1. CEO, 2. 2 PMs, 3. 2 analysts, 4. 2 assistants.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have a great communication with them and the project runs on time until now. Every step has been done in timely manner and with great professional attitude.

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

They work as an army. Everything has been planned up to the tiniest detail, and if anything unexpected happens, they have an answer. We set the project to be done with the waterfall methodology since our law doesn't allow agile, which would be preferred by both sides.

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

Montenegrin IT market has a few companies that have capacities to do extensive and more complex projects on the new technologies. Since we have a lot of legacy software on old technologies, companies don't develop and maintain aging systems. OYKOS made a bold and intelligent move to focus entirely on new technologies, which is refreshing for our market. They are a young and vibrant company that develops fast, and I expect them to become one of the biggest companies on the market in the next decade.

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

Since they are a young company with many intelligent young people, sometimes they need more specific experience. Still, they easily overcome that issue due to significant relations with other companies through the ICT cluster Cortex.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am CEO of NTH Media

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We are need for our client to develop mobile application to read biometric parameters from smart watch and send to claud database server every day

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We received a recommendation from the clients we work with, they were satisfied with the OYKOS company, the speed and quality of software delivery

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

analysis of input information, development of a project plan with a clearly defined timeline, after approval of the project plan we received reports on the completed modules that we received for testing

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

two PMs were in almost daily communication with us

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

we received the finished project before the deadline, where we had enough time to test it after successfully completed training by the OYKOS company

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

we communicated via skype, gira, gihthub and e-mails, the phenomenal experience of PMs made this process quite simple and fast

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

Their quick response to inquiries and timely reporting on project phases. and the kindness of all employees with whom we were in communication and, in the end, an excellent product with which our client was very satisfied

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

No