Software Planet Group

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are an outsourced development working mostly for Xerox Canada and Xerox Global. Xerox is doing some internal restructuring and has been investing in startups. Our company is one of those startups. We don't have a brand name and don't market our company. We have been working with Xerox for more than four years.

What is your position?

I am an entrepreneur and the owner of the company. At the same time, I am serving as the technical architect and project manager for our work with Xerox.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Software Planet Group?

My company works on an exclusively virtual basis, with resources in North America and Europe. We needed to augment our team.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Software Planet Group has been providing additional resources to our team, but they also have a separate relationship with Xerox for a mobile app development project.

Software Planet Group is a full-stack web developer, meaning that they can work on both the UI [user interface] and back-end. I was pleasantly surprised with Software Planet Group's capabilities and their rate. They're an effective outlet for offshore resources, from both a performance and financial perspective. 

We are using six full-time developers and two to three part-time ones from Software Planet Group. I participated in the selection process for our resources.

How did you come to work with Software Planet Group?

I was looking for help on Upwork and found Software Planet Group. We expanded our interaction from there. I was looking for individual developers initially, but Software Planet Group was able to persuade me through their good personnel. I interviewed many of those developers myself, along with my lead technical people.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total cost of Software Planet Group's services has been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with Software Planet Group for around one year.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Xerox is the one actually assessing the success of our work. They've maintained us in this configuration, and our project has been successful. We are planning to go live shortly and, judging by what I've heard from our partner, there is a good outlook on the future of this B2B [business-to-business] project. The percentage of startups actually launching their product successfully is probably less than 10 percent. We are still in that 10 percent, so we have been successful. A big part of this is the team added by Software Planet Group.

How did Software Planet Group perform from a project management standpoint?

I was pleasantly surprised by Software Planet Group's work ethic and way of doing business. We have short sprints for our work. Every week, Software Planet Group has presented the results. There hasn't been a single week when there was an issue with delivering the objective.

What distinguishes Software Planet Group from other providers?

I've been working with offshore developers from other countries, like India, Vietnam, and China. I was pleasantly surprised by Software Planet Group's level of English skills. They were able to communicate not only with the technical team but also with the client, directly. This was a nice feature that I discovered about Software Planet Group.

Is there anything Software Planet Group could have improved or done differently?

Nothing comes to mind. I'm very happy that I found Software Planet Group, and that we've been able to work together. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder of Worklogistics, which specializes in freelance product design for a variety of companies. We have worked with Google, Sunrun, Change.org, and a host of other companies, providing both product design and outsourced software production. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Software Planet Group?

I have assigned Software Planet Group a wide variety of work, both my own projects and work for other clients. They serve primarily as a technical resource but they do help me refine my ideas and strategy from time to time. 

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

The most complex project we've worked on with Software Planet Group was called LunchMaster. It involved very complex logistics around school lunches for thousands of students every day. Parents could go online and choose between 15 different types of lunches every single day. The platform would filter out items which the kids were allergic to, and it conformed to regulatory requirements for anonymizing free lunches so that neither the school officials nor anyone else could see them as such. This created very complex backend billing requirements for us. Those bills could either go to the parents so that they could pay using a credit card, or go to the schools and be remitted on an invoicing basis.

The interface looked like a calendar, displaying all the food choices in a graphical way, for each weekday. Each selection came with a set of drinks and fruit. There were 2 kitchens, as well as 3 distribution points. Every meal needed to be made by the kitchens and loaded onto trucks, which had different routes. Everything needed to be kept straight by the software, which made it a very complex situation. I worked with 2 development teams in parallel, each of them working on different pages of the site simultaneously, with one-week iteration periods. We launched on time, even though not everything had been built. We had a hard deadline because of the schoolyear. We initially started the work with a different firm, bringing Software Planet Group in on an emergency basis. We started the work with them only 3 months before launch.

The team assigned from Software Planet Group for this project consisted of 4 developers, as well as a 3-person professional quality assurance team, which was bolted onto the project. Software Planet Group also provided part-time IT support for managing our server setup, backups, etc.

How did you come to work with Software Planet Group?

I put an ad out on Upwork, which was called oDesk at the time. A large number of people responded, making the decision difficult. I picked 3 candidates, which looked good, and went forward with a test.

One month into the work, I looked at the results and chose Software Planet Group based on them. We've developed an ongoing relationship since then.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total cost of Software Planet Group's services has been between $250,000 and $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I have been working with Software Planet Group for 8-9 years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The client for our LunchMaster project was very inexperienced, running into financial problems and other difficulties. Despite this, the work that Software Planet Group did throughout the project was exceptional.

How did Software Planet Group perform from a project management standpoint?

We develop logistically-complex business applications, which are moving targets. Our LunchMaster client had been oversold on the timeline and budget of the project, which was not Software Planet Group's fault. They had no control over it. Software Planet Group provides hourly services, so they don't promise things that they won't be able to deliver because the ultimate goal of the project is not within their scope. Software Planet Group will work until completion, though.

In terms of overall productivity, it's hard to judge their team. Tasks that we thought would take a long time ended up being completed in a day or 2, while simpler items will take 1-2 weeks. Usually, this will be because of a deeper refactoring of the task. The governing factor in software productivity is product management. Developers are usually smart people, and if they've been doing it for a long time, they will usually be competent at their jobs. How well-factored the initial code was will affect how productive a developer will be, and this is dependent on how good the product manager was.

I paid for developers, but in addition to them, Software Planet Group assigned an internal project manager who made sure that the team was delivering. I took care of the actual day-to-day project management, creating detailed wireframes and specifications, and maintaining communication with the developers.

What distinguishes Software Planet Group from other providers?

Software Planet Group has an internal training process, which I find to be unusual and impressive about their company. I am based out of San Francisco, which is where many leading software solutions are developed. Software Planet Group is up on the techniques used by the best firms. Another indication of quality is how up-to-date Software Planet Group is on current best practices in the industry.

Is there anything Software Planet Group could have improved or done differently?

Software Planet Group has a large stable of developers and will usually assign whomever is free to new projects. During one project, a developer basically started inventing requirements and going off-target. To some degree, this was my own fault for not being clear. Things of this nature happened, but they were dealt with by Software Planet Group. It's normal for some issues to go off the rails. Nothing systemic ever occurred.

When working with an offshore team, it's important to have clear specifications of the work being done. Without this, they will get poor results. The bonus for this is largely on the client. Software Planet Group will do what they're told to do, but if that is sloppy and vague, there will likely be a sloppy, ill-defined project to deal-with going forward. High-definition wireframes will improve the output, clarifying the client's own thoughts. There will usually be a 10-hour time difference when working with Software Planet Group, so the team will work during night-time for the client. If they're not given clear instructions, they won't deliver the intended work.

BACKGROUND

Please introduce your business and what you do there.

We provide a healthcare cloud software, aiming to change the way in which hospitals purchase medical technology. We do this through a software aggregator of medical supplies and technologies. I'm the Chief Executive Officer and founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Software Planet Group?

We needed development resources for our software. We didn't have the time, money, or experience needed to hire the experts we'd need to be able to do this on our own. Because of that, we decided to try outsourcing the development and design to a 3rd party supplier.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Software Planet Group is in charge of developing our enterprise software.

We've used a number of developers from Software Planet Group. One of their resources has remained with us since the beginning.

How did you come to work with Software Planet Group?

We posted our project online and received 45-50 applications. We narrowed our selection down to groups and to an expertise level which matched what we were looking for, namely a Ruby on Rails backend and an AngularJS frontend. We also needed the ability to scale up or down accordingly. Software Planet Group offered full-stack developers, which was also important for us: the same resources could operate in both the backend and the frontend. The last piece of the puzzle was in terms of price. Software Planet Group had a higher tier price point for an overseas company, but they offered design and quality assurance elements, so we had access to a full stack team.

We interviewed 10 firms very intently with the help of our CTO [Chief Technology Officer], who ran through the gamut of candidates. Software Planet Group was the first firm which represented the level of professionalism that we needed on a technical level.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total cost of development with Software Planet Group has been in the realm of $200,000 to $300,000. Each of the developers offered by Software Planet Group has a cost of between $60,000 and $65,000 per year. We've worked with 3 developers for the initial 6 months, after which we ramped down to 2 and then 1 person.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working with Software Planet Group since October 2014. They're now in charge of implementing customer-requested additions. Cloud software is ever-changing and iterative.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I've been very impressed by Software Planet Group's ability to manage the novelty of what I presented to them. I have an engineering background and I have worked as a CTO, so I have a semblance of control in that regard.

From the standpoint of the work itself, Software Planet Group has had good speed, but they are lacking on the quality side. They're not used to being a production-facing shop, but are more of a MVP [minimum viable product] or beta-build company. We've probably been one of the first clients which requested interaction and high-demand quick churns. This may be my fault as well, but there has been some looseness around quality checks. I found that Software Planet Group pushed items which were noted as finished and complete, but were proven to be broken quickly by our customers, which put us in a bad place.

The fact that Software Planet Group isn't accustomed to working on long-term projects and that they have an MVP mindset has been evidenced by some of the emails I've received from upper management, asking me if the beta version of our software had been complete.

How did Software Planet Group perform from a project management standpoint?

Software Planet Group provided an English-speaking developer who was able to manage important conversations regarding our situation. Even the best developer would be of no use if they couldn't talk to the client. I liked how the team from Software Planet Group was structured. They have a business liaison which acts as the process manager. Any human resources items are taken care of through the lens of the business manager. He has been involved in our weekly calls and managed the process.

What distinguishes Software Planet Group from other providers?

My favorite line from Software Planet Group is "Everything is possible with software". There have never been moments of Software Planet Group not being able to figure something out. Their CTO is helpful in this regard.

Software Planet Group has brought a new spin on data migration and shed light on internal risks, outlining our different choices instead of leaving them for me to deal with all by myself. 

Is there anything Software Planet Group could have improved or done differently?

I have been frustrated with Software Planet Group's management style and team, specifically the upper management. They're very military-esque, not promoting an approach of "customer first". Software Planet Group's top-level industry team is a little rough around the edges, but their developers and business managers are different.

There have been personnel changes which were very abrupt, leaving us with a gap. I found this to be unfair, coming from a company which outsources talent. In November 2015, 3 of the 4 people on our team disappeared within one week. We were working with a designer, a developer, and a quality assurance tester, who were either let go or quit. There was no risk mitigation plan in place for this from Software Planet Group. New people were tricked in without a transition period. I noted this frustration to Software Planet Group in the past to the business liaison.

Even so, within the last year and a half, I've recommended Software Planet Group for their swift work. They provided many recommendations of technologies which I wasn't familiar with, giving me depth in the software realm.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

VidMatic builds data-driven software for global publishers. Our platform allows publishers to engage their audiences through a unified, real time bidding solution. We offer innovative, cross-device video formats that deliver high viewability rates and monetization potential. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Planet Group?

We hired them for a product revamp. 

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to produce a new version of our platform and optimize the code performance.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We decided to hire them based on their background and experience. 

What was the team composition?

They provided a tech lead and full-stack developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

They're a great team with excellent support.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

It was extremely effective.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I appreciated their organization and responsiveness.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

I can't think of any.