What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We had to break it off because it was a complete disaster. To give a little overview, we sent them an 88-page FRS when we were negotiating. It detailed every single thing. The design was finished, the FRS was written, the technical documentation was presented, and they had plenty of time to review. They said they could deliver in three months with a team of nine developers. That became four and then five months and so on. They promised to build the backend in React, but then we realized they didn’t have any in-house React resources.
Then, they persuaded us to switch the language to PHP, which wasn’t ideal but we went with it because we were pressed for time. Again, we found that that the two developers they’d given us were also working on another project. We had four project manager changes. We had to give them access to our AWS, and one of their developers deleted our website, which cost us over $15,000 to produce. They offered no remedy whatsoever. We asked for them to do something many times but they haven’t agreed. They fired the resource, but that doesn’t compensate for the damage. We had to spend another three months building a website, paying for all of it ourselves.
We didn’t start the agreement until we ensured that all the code would be put on our Git repository, and then, later during the development phase, we realized they weren’t using our Git. They held our code hostage until we made payments, contrary to our agreement. We negotiated it beforehand and they didn’t honor it. There was no code documentation from their end whatsoever, and there was no QA, so they used us and our team as their own personal QA, telling us to check this and that. it was very basic stuff that we had to do over and over.
They delivered under 40% of the project after one year when it was supposed to take only three months. We had to let them go and carry on with somebody else.
How did Appinventiv perform from a project management standpoint?
They changed the project manager four times without notice. The new manager wouldn’t read the FRs, which I think is absolutely critical. How are you going to manage a team building a complex project without reading the client’s documentation? Usually, vendors will get on a discovery call, understand our objectives, and they’ll write it for us. We incurred the cost of writing it ourselves to ensure that they understood what we wanted to accomplish in their language.
Each switch was detrimental, going from bad to worse. There were technical problems, and I’m not a technical guy. I spent hours on Google to find solutions for them, send it to them, and they would try to address it. As a non-developer, it’s hard to understand which technologies, frameworks, and libraries are compatible with one another. I shouldn’t have had to do this for them, but, even though I did, we still got nowhere.
What did you find most impressive about them?
No, not at all.
Are there any areas they could improve?
They should hire better resources and dedicate them to projects rather than sharing them. They had one or two good resources, and they put them on several projects, meaning they couldn’t concentrate on any one project specifically.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
If your project is very, very simple, extremely simple, perhaps it will work. But, if its anything semi-serious, they are not the company to go with.
Throughout the project, Appinventiv provided infrequent and unclear communication. This was exacerbated by frequent point of contact changes. They also failed to internalize project documentation and deliver on time. The client asks them to improve their technical bench and ownership of projects.