Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?
Our general sale cycles are about a year in length. Everything we start investing in from a sales perspective takes a very long time, and the deals are generally worth millions of dollars or more. We launched a product recently that they helped with significantly. Part of our organization in Europe is deploying that product with a few customers there.
From a qualitative perspective, Do IT has helped us start producing demos and sales assets using technologies that we didn’t have the time for ourselves. Things like Service Now and Salesforce are not major components of our business or BPM software, so from an investment perspective, being able to start building know-how in those areas in order to get deals is expensive because we have to hire full-time resources in the US who are experts in these domains. With Do IT’s expertise in these technologies, we’ve been actually able to get small sales gigs before needing to invest in full-time resources in that domain. That’s allowed us to explore technologies at a very low cost from an investment perspective.
How did Do IT Programming Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?
Since the team included up to 5 people at the peak, we’ve handled the project management. They provided more team leadership. Our first interactions with Nikita and the way he helped us pick the best resources indicated that they’d excel. We just haven’t quite grown to need that many resources to justify moving project management to their office.
We primary communicate through Skype. We’ve also been using our project management software called Rally, which is now CA. They’d never used it before and were happy to figure it out, and they got pretty productive with it. Our Scrum masters break down the user stories and assign them. Do IT broke those items down into tasks and actually worked on them.
What did you find most impressive about Do IT Programming Solutions?
I’ve worked with a lot of outsourcing firms that come across as body shops. Do IT tried to create their own culture. When I’m interacting with people on the team, I never feel like they’re there just to put in the hours. They care about doing a good job for their company. That was refreshing. They also have little recruitment videos and things like that to explain the organization’s uniqueness. I think that’s beneficial from a productivity perspective as well.
Are there any areas Do IT Programming Solutions could improve?
Sometimes, the engineers’ skill set wasn’t completely aligned with the team. They could provide a more structured way for breaking down what each individual does. On Upwork, they have different ratings based on different exams illustrating how competent they are in different areas. It sounds like Do IT is actually doing some of that internally. They actually do testing specific to JavaScript or a given framework, but that doesn’t come across in some of the information that they presented about their resources. This only happened once or twice, and I was able to correct it pretty quickly and find another person to fit the role. If they offered more information as far as what each individual excels at and what kind of credentials that person has, I think the setup process would be a bit smoother.
Do IT Programming Solutions’ dedicated development team produces high-quality work. They’re very organized, following a structured workflow to assure each task is complete. Despite some turnover, the current team is responsive and efficient. It will likely be a lasting partnership.