What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
They did a great job designing the home page, which is a critical page from the user’s point of view. We spent a lot of time going over different renditions.
How did The Bureau of Small Projects perform from a project management standpoint?
We initially worked with David on the home page design, which went well. Then, our project manager returned from vacation, and we went from working with David to her. We felt that a lot of the original project requirements and agreements got lost in the shuffle. They did a good job meeting deadlines; from creative and design perspectives, the work that they did after the homepage was lacking. They used basic project management tools like Dropbox and Google Drive.
What did you find most impressive about them?
The Bureau of Small Projects was very responsive. If we needed something, they were quick to get back to us.
David had an incredible sense of design and a remarkable creative perspective. During the initial phase of the project, David helped us lay out what we wanted to accomplish with the website and the different visions that we had. He was very good at aligning all of this and transferring it to the website.
Are there any areas they could improve?
Although the home page they created was fantastic, The Bureau of Small Projects stopped considering our input after that. They were responsive during the project, but once they did everything that was in their scope of work, it was difficult to get them to fix issues.
Additionally, their internal communications could’ve been better. For example, we’d spoken with David about a lot of expectations and goals, which weren’t relayed to the project manager when she took over. Also, we clearly defined the scope of the work in a 10–12-page document, but when we asked for certain things, they said doing so would cost extra.
My company was disappointed with the end result; we’d outsourced the project to expedite it, yet we had to redo almost everything inhouse. We were 60–70% on the way to having a great website, but we were disappointed by The Bureau of Small Projects’ performance toward the end of the project.
Finally, The Bureau of Small Projects assured us that they’d build our site’s backend on the WordPress Divi Builder because this was what we knew. However, they built the site using a different theme builder that no one on my team was familiar with, so making changes and adding pages was very difficult. We eventually asked for the site back so that we could redesign it ourselves, and we basically started from scratch.
The new site has exceeded expectations, both in the design and usability. The Bureau Of Small Projects provides creative solutions within a short timeframe and under budget. Their team is responsible and dedicated.