BringOnBoard

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the product owner of a Consulting and HR tech company. We advise medium and large companies and serve own-developed related HR tech solutions.

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

We looked for HR tech solutions on the market that support our professional consultancy background. We didn't find the ones that are proper, simple, easy-to-use. So, in 2018 we started to develop our own digital solutions. We needed more developer to build our applications. We've found that BringOnBoard could be a good partner, and we are right.

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

We found them through a referral. We needed a results-driven, dynamic, agile, cooperative partner.

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

We first started with a discovery workshop to go over our business challenges and our HR tech solutions we already have. We discussed the workflows, front-end designs and codes before starting back-end developing. We work together with several projects, not only one. They are completing the projects in 2-week sprints, which allowed us to test functions and give feedback. The final product will support feedback culture and performance appraisal processes and reports.

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

There are 3 people in the core team, including a project leader, a project manager, and 1 junior developer. Other resources would come and go depending on the project needs.

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

We were able to launch one of the projects early, which was a major achievement for us. The easy-to-use application frees up our clients' employees' administration time, which allows them to focus on other tasks. It also motivates and inspires them to give real-time feedback day by day instead of occasional ones during the year. Their team performed so well that we decided to continue working with them to maintain the solution.

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

The project management is great. We work mostly by agile way during the development part and keep retrospective meetings. They regularly meet deadlines, and we never had unexpected turnovers. We communicate through Meet, Zoom, Slack, Jira and GitHub.

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

We had direct access to the project leader, manager and also to the developer according to what we needed, which made it easier to communicate our ideas, feedbacks.

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

We are continuously harmonizing our workflow and cooperation by the feedback we give each other on retrospetive meetings.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the co-founder of Bindr, a UK-based virtual platform for students. On the platform, students join virtual study sessions with 5–20 other students worldwide. These sessions are muted to facilitate accountability and productivity. 

What challenge were you trying to address with BringOnBoard?

We already had the platform built, but we needed staff to augment our development team. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

BringOnBoard augmented our two-person full-stack development team with two of their teammates to build custom software to keep students socially connected. 

They are working on the full-stack, which is mainly in React and Node.js. The key platform function is the study session: a video conference where everyone is muted but still has access to the camera and chat. 

We use an open-source software, Jitsi, for the study session feature. We also have a login, account system, and additional features that make it easy to create, join, and sign-up for live study sessions. 

As we collect customer feedback and problems to solve on the app, we also change the features and related issues. We are continuously iterating the platform, so the project is unending.

What is the team composition?

I work with two developers from BringOnBoard. 

How did you come to work with BringOnBoard?

We found BringOnBoard through online sources. We initially worked together with one of their developers and then added another to the team when we needed to. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested $10,000–$50,000 with BringOnBoard.  

 What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership started in May 2021 and it's ongoing. 

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

We measure the success of the development process by whether or not BringOnBoard can deliver on time, and they do. We also measure KPIs around our platform, like active user engagement. 

How did BringOnBoard perform from a project management standpoint?

BringOnBoard is awesome at project management. We can talk to them directly and they are very responsive — we use Slack to communicate. 

We have an alignment call each week where we discuss the most important issues and how we'll work on them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

BringOnBoard is like a part of our internal team and allows us to expand our team quickly. They are super fast and very flexible, and it's exactly what we need. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

In the first month, communication could have been better and more transparent. 

Any advice for potential customers?

If clients want to get the best work they can out of BringOnBoard, they should be clear about what they want.