BAPits

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Foster+Partners is an architectural firm. We have a huge IT department to support our business needs made up of 100 people or so. We undergo sustainability, hardware/infrastructure, and development projects inside the department.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with BAPits?

We were looking for acceleration in development velocity, and we were having difficulties hiring people on an immediate basis. There were some deadlines that we wanted to meet and from an Agile perspective, we went to BAPits to accelerate our development processes.

Additionally, the team we had in-house was kind of new, and we wanted someone with experience in the things we wanted to make, namely responsive web applications in Angular or React.

SOLUTION

What is the team composition?

They had a team in the backend, but we communicated mainly with two people. As a project manager, I was managing their tasks.

How did you come to work with BAPits?

I worked with them in the past when I was deployed with an organization in Dubai, so I suggested them to my PM when I started with this company. We didn’t have the skillsets in-house, so it would’ve been better and lower-risk to go with an external partner we could actually trust.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent more than £50,000 (approximately $68,600 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from January 2019–January 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We had a very tight deadline and our KPIs were more about success than showing demonstrable progress. It was required of BAPits to adapt to those bureaucratic processes, and they handled it pretty well. We had strict requirements from them and BAPits stood behind their commitments, and all demonstrations were on time.

These kinds of things were dealt with, and the collaboration’s been fine overall. BAPits has supported us in meeting the goals we had. I did accelerate our velocity so rather than hiring new people, BAPits mobilized our team immediately and put everything into practice.

How did BAPits perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a bit of a problem at the beginning with communication, where some people had to adjust to the fact that a simple text, phone call, or Skype message wouldn’t be enough for someone to bring their support. It was a challenge in the beginning, but BAPits assigned an additional resource to help with this.

There was one demo that failed, down the line in the project and a couple of things were misunderstood, but I think it’s fair to say that it can happen in any project. The only way I think it could’ve been better is if BAPits would have consulted with us when they had a question, instead of going ahead on their own.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We were impressed with their pricing and flexibility. They adapted to the psychological challenges we had being a new company and them being our new vendor.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If I were to hire them again, the scope would have to be quite detailed because some parts of the project were assumption-based. It’s not that we didn’t know what we wanted, but we were experimenting on our side, and we wanted to see which area was going to be better.