Touch To

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Portfolio Manager of Waterloo Capital

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Financial Services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Touch To to accomplish?

• Present new redesign options
• Create a new "scoring" model and update it via an API
• Create a new back end log in/admin portal
• Redo most of the code for updating correctly

SOLUTION

How did you find Touch To?

Word of mouth/worked in past

Why did you select Touch To over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Touch To were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Scope of Services Specific areas to be addressed include: 

1. Development Tasks 
   1. Client Prioritized Quick Fixes & Feature Enhancements Statement of Work No. [3] - Page 1 of 4 
      1. Fix broken Macro-economic statistics that are not updating 
         1. Wrap the `macroupdate/app.py` service to re-raise errors and log to the Sentry.io instance 
         2. Run production service manually and verify errors correctly log to Sentry.io 3. Copy production database to a local copy and fix any errors encountered for specific macros 
         3. Add timestamp field for `last_fetch_completed_at` for the last successful FRED API call 
         4. Add timestamp field for `last_fetch_attempted_at` and `last_fetch_result` which could indicate any error message from the remote FRED API 
      2. Fix "QVGM" "QVGS" and "QVG" metrics that are not updating for securities
         1. The solution requires further dialogue with Client. 
         2. Requires portfolio123 API 
      3. Implement a solution so that Waterloo Capital can add/remove/update web app users 
         1. Install the Django "automatic admin site" for the User model. Django specifically makes it easy to view and update database records for superusers in a separate admin site. 
         2. Add Admin pages for the User data model 
      4. Add/update Ticker Symbols 
         1. Add a Django admin page for Security to add tickers manually 
   2. Necessary Development Maintenance 
      1. Database and server are not being backed up 
         1. Immediately configure EC2 EBS volume snapshots on a scheduled basis for e.g. 30 days rolling. 
      2. Allowance for any SQL schema updates 
         1. The Django application does not run locally; some further updates to schema may be needed/advised to ensure SQL schema is robust (e.g. adding uniqueness constraint to ticker symbols or similar). 
   3. Future SaaS Roadmap Preparation Development Tasks 
      1. Current concerns as stated elsewhere re: stateful data, configuration, and source code that only exists on the production web server.
      2. Work should be undertaken to make it possible to run the full application locally. Statement of Work No. [3] - Page 2 of 4 
         1. A lot of production data is already seeded manually and the scripts just update this data. 
         2. This initial "seed" data could be provided as YAML data fixtures 
         3. The app should be updated to work from an "empty data" state with no "seed" data if possible (right now it crashes without certain seed market data, etc). 
      3. Vendor would like a bucket of hours to begin work to make the project more developer friendly for local development. 
      4. Scheduled tasks could be moved from crontab to Celery distributed tasks (Django app) 
      5. Finally, effort should be taken to try to launch a “clean” staging site on EC2 that runs the production app successfully. The current deployment relies on a lot of manual configuration over-taken by different sys admins over the last few years and this ought to be at least replaced with some “infrastructure as code” solution. 
         Most of the source code that interacts with the production database lives in the CentOS home directory and does not appear to be committed to Git. Or when committed, has modified files in-tree that are not committed to Git. The deployments are not made from Git to prod, but over SSH remote terminal, etc. 
   4. Design Discovery 
      1. Website audit 
      2. Waterloo Captial SME interviews 
      3. Preliminary conceptual mock-ups
      4. Estimates for remaining design work

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Fulfilled all scope of work. Communication was excellent. Always took time and helped.

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

Yes. Very good project management. They worked in two week blocks and always were in communication when questions needed answered or clarification.

What was your primary form of communication with Touch To?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

We were impressed by their communication and creativity. Also listening and taking great notes.

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

no

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Skimmer is a cloud-based software platform for Pool Service Companies. I am the Head of Payments.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Touch To, and what were your goals?

TouchTo was hired to take our website design and build it inside of our CMS of choice, HubSpot.

SOLUTION

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

I wasn't directly involved in choosing the vendor, but I know we looked at several vendors before choosing TouchTo and found that they highly skilled and easy to work with.

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

We had a kick-off meeting to discuss the overall project, goals, and timelines. After that, we had regular meetings via Zoom and communicated along the way via Slack and email. TouchTo did a great job of organizing our various requests and always followed up on them.

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

We worked with three people. Matt was the project manager and he did a great job of helping us all stay organized and communicating our requests to the website developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

TouchTo did a great job of delivering exactly what we asked for. We are still working with them as things come up and they are quick to help.

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

We had meetings to go over the thigns we requested and then we had follow-up meetings for them to demo the work when it was finished. TouchTo did a great job of keeping track of all of our requests and following up on them.

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

They were excellent communicators who were very professional. They did a good job of helping us find solutions in the Hubspot CMS that would make it easier for us to update the site in the future.

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

TouchTo was excellent and I can't think of anything specific to improve upon.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Skimmer is a cloud-based software platform for Pool Service Companies. I am the Director of Marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Touch To, and what were your goals?

Our current website is a static website with HTML. Our company decided to adopt Hubspot as our CMS and CRM. We needed a site that we could manage on our own and one that integrated and was built on Hubspot.

SOLUTION

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

Our leadership team evaluated several vendors that were recommended. We wanted good partners, and we found that with TouchTo.

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

We had a kick off meeting and regular meetings, meeting about once a week. We communicated via Slack (which we love in a vendor) and over Zoom for regular meetings. We rarely used email, as TouchTo was responsive via Slack.

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

There were three people who worked with us. One was the project manager, Matt, and developers/UI designers Nicole and Odis.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The site isn't launched yet, but it is a vast improvement over what we had. We can now edit our website content on our own versus the static html site we had before.

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

Matt is an excellent project manager. He communicated regularly, is approachable, and fun to work with. He's fantastic at gathering requirements and scoping those out for his developers. He's very responsive on Slack.

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

They're fast, and they communicate incredibly well. Their rates are excellent.

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

TouchTo was a perfect partner, and we're engaging them for other projects.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the lead front-end developer, also chipping in as full-stack developer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Touch To, and what were your goals?

We had created a beta analytics dashboard, that was powered by file-based reporting that our team was importing into the system. We needed a way for customers to load the reports, and to automate the parsing a processing of the data.

SOLUTION

How did you select Touch To and what were the deciding factors?

I have know Aaron, one of the founders, for years, and I knew they would provide quick, well-written solutions. I also felt I could trust them to handle any details with high-level solutions while our internal team focused on other features.

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

TouchTo set up our whole AWS infrastructure. EC2s, Jenkins pipeline, SQL server, all the virtual wiring. They also provided an Express app template that was Dockerized and used a one-button deploy method. Then on top, React app that would upload files to S3, parse and load into the DB for processing and export to dashboards.

How many people from the Touch to team worked with you, and what were their positions?

2 team members: Aaron as an architect and AWS expert, and Dylan as a Node/React developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to grow from one or two customers sending our team files, to 8+ organizations with several users uploading files without our intervention. The only time we have to think about uploads is if the reports are incorrectly formatted, and we get a notice from the system.

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

The experience of the team allowed them to grasp what we were asking for and how to implement it quickly. The TouchTo team also handled the shifting task list of a startup very well, and met all deadlines agreed to.

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

Our company didn't just need people to crank out our orders, we needed a team to help us with best practices and how we could scale, and TouchTo excelled at that aspect.

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

Sometimes the changing priorities led to tension over deliverables, but issues were resolved through good communication.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I manage product and tech communications - as well as strategic projects for our CTO and CPO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Touch To?

We created a technology microsite - independent of our corporate website - to showcase our engineering talent and amplify their voice across the external tech community. TouchTo leveraged our internal, branded design library to create some beautiful mockups for us.

SOLUTION

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

We'd worked with TouchTo in the past - very efficient turnaround times and excellent services.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We went through multiple rounds of design mockups - each time with TouchTo team worked efficiently and was extremely responsive to feedback and revisions.

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

Two resources.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The mockups we received were polished and consumable - again - the TouchTo team was very receptive to feedback and making timely revisions to our design suggestions.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They're extremely effective and efficient.

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

The availability of our contacts were always responsive and followed up thoughtfully and purposefully.

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

n/a