Forgeahead Solutions Inc.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Chief Technology Officer of iQPay

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

As a newly hired CTO of a SaaS startup I had to revamp the engineering team - basically raise the level of professional development by 100x - for our very complex Digital Payment SaaS Platform product.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Forgeahead Solutions Inc. to accomplish?

• Bring in high-caliber engineering team including the engineering manager - but meet the challenge of bringing in a team of about 8-10 resources within 1 month.
• Very quickly ramp up on the product development - with 5 years of history to catch up on.
• Establish a agile process and drive a product development to accomplish a go-live in less than 3 months after taking over.

SOLUTION

How did you find Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Prior Engagement

Why did you select Forgeahead Solutions Inc. over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned
• Feedback from Other Customers

How many teammates from Forgeahead Solutions Inc. were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Overall the scope of work involved: 

• Start Technology Evaluation on current product and code-base 
• Propose a plan to re-vamp the technology and launch the new SaaS platform 
• Take over management of the development work on a day-to-day basis 
• establish dev processes, and agile methodology, train the team and run daily scrum calls
• Play a major roal in driving product roadmap, and detailed requirements gathering
• Take on development work 
• software architecture, software/cloud design, coding, QA, DevOps
• Establish DevOps and Cloud deployment processes 
• Establish a formal QA process
• Migrate from on-prem to the cloud
• Launch the Cloud version within 3 months
• Ongoing product development
• continue building new features and capabilities

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Cycle Time 
• Team Velocity/Sprint 
• Defects Detection Ratio
• Bugs Rate
• Internal-teams Satisfaction Surveys
• End-Customer NPS

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Their VP of Delivery was very engaged for the initial team setup. He worked very closely with us to understand the technical and business needs, the company culture, and the long term objectives. He worked almost 24x7 going out to hire the right Development Manager as it was clear we were looking for a Dev Manager who had a lot stronger leadership skills. 

Once the project kicked off - the VP and the Sales AE were involved in daily calls, lending their expertise to the team and ensuring they understood the needs clearly as they built out the project team. Deliverables were on time, and documentation and code deliverables were also of very high quality.

What was your primary form of communication with Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Virtual Meeting

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

• Commitment of their leadership throughout the project. Six months into it now that the ongoing development is going very smoothly. their leadership still has twice-a-month governance calls with us ensuring things stay on track and any issues, however small, are addressed before they become a problem
• Caliber of resources. they are one of the best boutique development teams I have come across. The team's technical ability is excellent, and they're also very good at communicating. 
• How every member of the team including their QA and DevOps person, constantly provides very good business feedback both from features/user experience perspective as well as minimizing cloud and third-party costs.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Forgeahead Solutions Inc. could have done differently?

While I always find something with every vendor I have worked with in the past 30 years - I truly cannot find anything I can remotely point to for ForgeAhead guys. They over-delivered on every aspect of the engagement, including their sales AE who was and remains highly committed to our success.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an Engineering executive at (a/an) Software

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

At every stage of the capital project lifecycle, we allow you to collaborate with partners to mitigate the safety, finance, quality, and sustainability risks that determine success or failure.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Forgeahead Solutions Inc. to accomplish?

• Build modern Enterprise SaaS platform
• Work with legacy product to migrate data to new SaaS platform

SOLUTION

How did you find Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Forgeahead Solutions Inc. over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

What was the size of Forgeahead Solutions Inc.’s team?

20

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Manage and build the core application architecture to replace our legacy application platform using a centralized database and cloud-native approach with modern languages and frameworks (Java Spring Boot, Angular).

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• To demonstrate progress and success, the Forgeahead team was initially required to deliver key feature milestones tied to project dates. After our company moved to an agile Product Development process, we managed progress and deliverables via regular check-ins and sprint methodologies.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Forgeahead was extraordinarily flexible and collaborative regarding project management, tight deadlines, and changes in requirements. Throughout the process, they were excellent partners going above and beyond to help meet our needs and ensure the success of our critical project deadlines.

What was your primary form of communication with Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Forgeahead has been an excellent partner in adapting and adjusting to shifting development processes as we grew and scaled our internal development organization and implemented agile development best practices.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Forgeahead Solutions Inc. could have done differently?

Due to tight deadlines, there were numerous times when application architectural patterns were not adhered to, leading to many anti-patterns throughout our codebase. This technical debt has resulted in bugs, and development velocity reductions that could have been avoided had best practices been followed more rigidly in the past.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder & CEO of NoodleTools, Inc.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Educational software development

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Forgeahead Solutions Inc. to accomplish?

• Ongoing development of new features and bug-fixing
• Build and maintain our scalable SaaS platform (including migration of legacy platform to AWS)
• Develop microservices based architecture
• Rewrite the original PHP codebase to Python and relevant/modern libraries and technologies
• Develop automated testing procedures

SOLUTION

How did you find Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Referral

Why did you select Forgeahead Solutions Inc. over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

What was the size of Forgeahead Solutions Inc.’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Forgeahead's team has worked hand-in-hand with us for over a decade, initially to migrate our legacy application to AWS, rewrite the entire codebase from PHP to Python, and migrate to a microservices architecture, all of which allowed us to scale to support millions of users.

Following that backend restructuring, they completed a complete overhaul of the outdated UI/UX, which included some graphical design work on their side as well. In recent years, they've provided a highly-competent development and QA team to take new features, like digital notecards and database citation export, from concept to completion.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• The product has maintained a competitive advantage over other similar platforms in the space. Server downtime has been virtually nonexistent in the last 3 years under the new architecture. Our company has become known for our reliability and innovation.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Forgeahead delivers weekly reports summarizing the completed tasks and upcoming deliverables. Ongoing projects are scheduled out as far as 6 months, which meets our needs. Most projects are delivered in a timely manner. When there is a delay, it is generally because the project's scope was unclear or underestimated in the early design stages -- but the team stays in communication with us to keep us informed.

What was your primary form of communication with Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email
• Messaging App

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

We find it very useful that even though there are occasional changes to the team members assigned to our projects, the codebase/domain knowledge is passed through to the incoming developers efficiently. Their flexibility keeps project development on time.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Forgeahead Solutions Inc. could have done differently?

Occasionally we've had to ask for more communication from the team, to allow executive members in our company to understand project status and timeline. We've been happy with the response to those requests when we've made them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Divisional Vice President of FitnessOnDemand

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Commercial digital wellness solutions

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Forgeahead Solutions Inc. to accomplish?

• Product Development & Delivery
• Staff Augmentation

SOLUTION

How did you find Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Online Search

Why did you select Forgeahead Solutions Inc. over others?

Pricing fit our budget

What was the size of Forgeahead Solutions Inc.’s team?

6-10 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Custom software product development. Sprint based delivery. Roadmap delivery to drive revenue and retention.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Roadmap delivery over the years
• QA of software being developed
• Feature additions to custom software
• Drive value to customer with every enhancement

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project management was lead by the Scrum master/ Project manager to the India team. The manager worked with our management to drive roadmap details and translate those to requirements for the development team. The scope was large as it included web development, mobile app support and B2B2C type of app ecosystem delivery. The project manager was diligent about understanding not only our needs but our customers as well, which is key. They provided feedback and guidance on timing of project delivery. They went into extensive talent search work, to identify and recruit the right candidates for the project. Emphasis was made on communication with on-site team.

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

The people on the team by far set this company apart from the others. They genuinely care about the project success and the client's commercial success.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Forgeahead Solutions Inc. could have done differently?

Being proactive about technical limitations of the current system could help avoid longer term problems.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of a software construction company ConstructSecure. We deliver SAAS solutions for our clients to provide insight into the subcontractors they hire for large construction projects and facilities management

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We talked Forgeahead with a complete rewrite of our existing platform. We decided on Java/Postgres.

SOLUTION

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

We interviewed about 6 vendors and Forgeahead came out as the clear winner. The deciding factor was a good product management, good architectural skills and communication skills.

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

The deliverable is ultimately our clients moving from our old platform to the new platform. That is almost complete. We work in an agile development, with a new release about every 2 weeks. We use AWS, Java/Postgres and SonarQube for code coverage.

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

About 20. Project managers, senior developers, front end developers, manual QA and automated QA. We use JIRA for tracking tasks and Confluence

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The feedback has been very good from our clients. Given that it's a full rewrite, we've had very few issues with our clients migrating to the new platform. There's always bugs in software, but ForgeAhead was efficient in finding/fixing

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

It's excellent. They have provided a seasoned project manager that has done a great job in communicating with his own team and our team at ConstructSecure.

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

Impressive is how they can work with a small team in Vancouver and most in India and still run very smoothly

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

Overall work is very good. Sometimes the estimates aren't quite exact, but that's to be expected

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive of Contrext Pvt Limited

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

AIML Contract management system

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Forgeahead Solutions Inc. to accomplish?

• Build the application

SOLUTION

How did you find Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

Referral

Why did you select Forgeahead Solutions Inc. over others?

High ratings, Pricing fit our budget, Great culture fit, Good value for cost, Referred to me

What was the size of Forgeahead Solutions Inc.’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Development of the entire contract management system including AIML modules are being built by ForgeAhead's team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• We have well defined milestones for building the application tracking progress against various modules.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They were extremely responsive with weekly demo calls to review changes and strategize on new features. Issues found were proactively highlighted so they don't become a gating item. The company consistently delivered on the deadlines.

What was your primary form of communication with Forgeahead Solutions Inc.?

In-Person Meeting, Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

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

ForgeAhead has a smart team of people, who can think of the overall project and not just their part of the code. They understand our business needs and are able to provide solutions.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Forgeahead Solutions Inc. could have done differently?

I'm extremely happy with the team and look forward to continue working with them.