Custom Software Dev for Charter School
- Custom Software Development
- $50,000 to $199,999
- Mar. 2019 - July 2020
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 4.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
“I was impressed by their dedication to good communication, meeting regularly, and answering questions.”
- Education
- Grand Junction, Colorado
- 11-50 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
DEPT® (formerly Devetry) built custom software with a Salesforce backend that handles schedules, attendance, reporting, meeting schedules, and funding requests for a school. Then they connected it with the school’s mainframe.
Users find the new system more intuitive and easier to work with. DEPT® (formerly Devetry) managed the project well and was able to make adjustments as the project needs shifted. They facilitated cross-team communication and ensured that everyone was an active participant in the process.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I am the director of a charter school. We are a homeschool hybrid program where some students are learning on-site and some are learning remotely, all of which need to be captured on a website.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with Devetry?
We needed help with custom software development. We already had a ColdFusion program before and we had several programmers work on it. It had been added onto in a lot of different codes and it was really starting to act up because of all of the different pieces that we had plugged into it.
We decided to start from scratch and rewrite a whole new platform so our users would be able to navigate schedules, attendance, report work, and determine if funding requests have been paid. It has a wide variety of functions that we were looking for a website to do.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
We needed a way for all parents in our program, which is about 400 students, to be able to document the work that they do every single day and then to be able to capture that work in reports that we could submit to the state. Since we don’t have students on-site, we can’t rely on the typical classroom to see if a student is present. This system provides a way to track attendance, compile reports, track funding, and facilitate communication between the students and our staff.
I really liked the way they went about it. They're in Denver and we're in Grand Junction, so they brought a team out here to spend a day with us talking about the different components we needed. After that, we scoped out what could do in a year, and what we would have to add on in later phases. They spent a lot of time trying to understand what we do and what we needed from our new platform.
We then determined what it would actually look like for all our different users. Then they worked on the backend and tried to make the functionality work for all those pieces. The whole backend was built around Salesforce which they used for the main structure.
They have to connect with our school district's mainframe and they had to find a way to import the information from our whole school district into our site. They had to figure out how to extract the data from the district platform and format it for our platform while ensuring that we remained connected to the district platform. This way, if someone changed information, such as their address, it would change in the system.
The last step we did was load all of the student data onto the platform, including 400 current students, and 800 alumni.
What is the team composition?
We mostly worked with three people on a regular basis. Leia (Business Analyst) oversaw the whole communication patterns and then Ben (Developer) did the vast majority of the programming. There was another person who did all of the mock-ups and all the frontend stuff.
How did you come to work with Devetry?
My assistant director conducted a really wide search from Salt Lake City to Denver, but we wanted to stay within the state if we could. She narrowed down the list to six people and then we sent an RFP to each of them. Four of them got back to us, and we went to interview them.
We drove to Denver to meet with two of them and then also met with one locally. We asked some questions and talked through the details of what we needed.
We chose Devetry because they were the best ones to deal with a project this big and see it through to the end. We knew that this was a complicated project and we needed a partner who could do the entire thing from scratch.
How much have you invested in them?
I am pretty sure it is between $150,000–$200,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We signed our contract and actually started working with them in March 2019. We launched the website in July 2020.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Various staff members and families have said that they think the new program is way more intuitive and easier to work with.
To be fair, we have people that are still struggling with it because they're less familiar with the technology. But even our more technically-challenged staff members are really beginning to realize that the layout is simpler and it's easier to find things.
Yesterday a staff member discovered the reports button, and she said it was super easy to use and very helpful. It provides information that they didn’t have before. As they explore it and get comfortable with it, they are liking it.
Anecdotally, we have roughly 100 new students every year. These are people who don’t know what we do and then they are trying to figure out how to do it on a website, especially found it very easy because they weren’t trying to compare it to the old one.
We didn’t have to do a lot of training or troubleshooting to get everyone up to speed on the platform. Once people were able to access the platform, it was pretty easy for them to understand what they needed to do and move onto the next thing without getting lost in it. Overall, we are really, really happy about that.
How did Devetry perform from a project management standpoint?
We were particularly impressed with project management. They kept really good notes and were good at going back and reviewing them if needed, which kept everything on track.
It was a big undertaking, but after we had that initial meeting, we had phone calls, and sprint reviews every two weeks. At each meeting, they gave us an idea of what they were doing and what they were about to work on. They had a big spreadsheet to show us how that all fit together and what would work at what times.
Once a week we would meet to look at what they had done and talk through how things were working. It was long and painful at times because there is a ton of detail and there were things that would come up as we went.
They really did a good job of sifting through all of our requirements and determining if they were within the scope of our project. They did a really good job of sticking to what we all had originally said we needed and then moving stuff off when we realized it was too complex for what we were doing for our first year.
What did you find most impressive about them?
I was impressed by their dedication to good communication, meeting regularly, and answering questions. They ensured that everyone was able to participate and feel heard and that our needs were met.
We've had difficulty communicating with other developers in the past, but Devetry has been really responsive when something doesn't work right. They're able to look at a problem and either fix it or show us how to troubleshoot the issue.
Especially during the first stage when we had more challenges, they weren't defensive and didn't blame us. It's a tough time for us because we have hundreds of students and staff members trying to learn the site. It is all happening at once and it is pretty crazy.
Devetry handled that well and were understanding. They put everything in a big spreadsheet, and it was easy for us to get answers. We didn’t get everything we wanted, and they were realistic about the changes we wanted. They were very diligent in making sure that the final product resulted what we agreed to in the scope.
Are there any areas they could improve?
We were tripped up on the whole funding part of the program. We didn't understand how deep the funding issue was and how many other things it affected. For a while, they were trying to give fairly simplistic solutions to a pretty complex situation. As a result, we need them to redo part of the program.
The funding form doesn't save, so it has to to be completed and submitted in one go. If users make a mistake or stop and come back to it, they have to start again. It was just an oversight and we should have thought of that as well. They could have spent more time trying to understand how complex that task was before trying to design it.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Be super upfront and open about what your needs are. Diving into the details and explainging why you need certain things is well-worth the time. Don’t expect them to read your mind, but spell out exactly what you need and let them figure out how to make that work.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
4.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS