Offshore Development for NYC Media Retailer
- Web Development
- $1,000,000 to $9,999,999
- Mar. 2011 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 4.5
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"[W]hen they do promise something, they will be able to deliver.”
- Media
- New York City, New York
- 201-500 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
IT Craft developed several online stores for a wide variety of retail businesses.
The custom platform developed by IT Craft was rated fourth in the United States by customers. Site load times were cut nearly in half, allowing stafff to deliver more than double the anticipated amount of projects. The agency's industry expertise enabled them to deliver on time and within budget.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your organization.
It's a family organization, and we have six different retail businesses. Three of them are in the camera industry, and the other ones are scuba diving and camping. For the camera businesses, we do retail for photo equipment and rentals. In the scuba diving and camping businesses, it's retail only.
What is your position?
I'm the chief technology officer.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What business challenge were you trying to address with IT Craft?
The scope of was small. We were working with a different agency beforehand, and we were very disappointed in their service. When we first decided to engage IT Craft, we gave them a small project to demo their skills. It was a fixed-price project, and they delivered on time and within our specified budget so we kept going from there. At some point later, we felt comfortable cutting the cord with the previous agency and starting working exclusively with IT Craft. We've worked with them ever since.
SOLUTION
Please describe the scope of their involvement.
We started out with two people, and today we are close to having the people full-time. We began with .NET development and it grew quickly into a continuous integration dynamic and a 24/7 monitoring team. We hired help from them for our system administrators. Today, they maintain a big part of our data center. We also have their division of PHP helping. We are using them as our main resource for pushing everything outside of the company. We outsource to them whatever we can.
I designed the team in a way that we have a unit in-house for project management, business analysis, and the UX [user experience] design. When it comes to development, testing, and monitoring, IT Craft is doing it all. The planning is done in-house, and the execution is done by IT Craft.
How did you come to work with IT Craft?
We rely on our internal team members with everything. When we have to hire, we prefer to hire people recommended by one of our in-house team members. We had interviewed, and we tried to do the research on new companies. One of our team members told us that his father works for an agency that is brilliant. What convinced me personally, back then, to give them a chance was that his father told me that they consider every project as if this was the first project for the company. This is something that I can confirm is still true today, and this is what convinced me to join them.
Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?
In 2015, it will be in the range of $2.5 to $3 million.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them in March 2011, and we continue to use them.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
Every year, customers are grading the online stores in the United States. In 2014, we were number four, and there's a reason for that. All of our businesses are using the very same platform, which IT Craft developed from scratch. They started at the end of 2011 to rebuild everything and, at this point in time, it's 99 percent rebuilt.
The technical challenges of using the same platform for multiple companies is significant. It's as if you were developing your own open-source project. They were successful in building a platform like this and keeping it efficient, reliable and scalable. This means adding new features, maintaining, and making a high-performance website, which has great performance speeds. This gives me some indication about their quality.
One important thing is that we started a project back in May of this year [2015] with the goal to cut 50 percent of the load time on the site. We started at 6.85 seconds on average and, right now, they are 3.9. This is huge, and this is another measurable that I see with them.
Budget-wise, with several optimizations still in progress, we've got some improvements in 2015, about 1.65 seconds off of performance speeds, and one of them is 35 percent more for the same budget. In reality, due to the budget increase, we delivered more than twice as many projects as we delivered in 2014. This is also significant.
As with every offshore company, they are a resource. You can't just put in a quarter and get a Coke. It doesn't work that way. You have to work with them daily, and you have visit to their offices a few times a year. To be successful, you need to treat them as team members. The more they are going to be part of the game, the more successful both they and you will be.
How did IT Craft perform from a project management standpoint?
I give them many fixed-price projects. IT Craft has never, ever violated a budget or a deadline of a fixed-price project. Of course, when you're talking about time and materials, we had some expectations that were not always met. However, as we got more realistic and got to know them better, we got more accurate about the regular deadlines, not only fixed-price projects. I would say we are doing about 30 to 40 percent of our projects as fixed price, and the rest is time and materials. We use JIRA and JIRA agile boards as our main tools.
What distinguishes IT Craft from other providers?
I think I can summarize this with two points. Point number one, they take every single project with a beginner's mind. This is a great approach. I've worked with many companies, and usually you are just another item on a checklist that doesn't get checked off. With them, it's different. They consider who the best person is to manage this specific project, and I like that.
My second point is that they are realistic. They never promise something they don't believe is going to happen. This allows me to rely on them, and I know that when they do promise something, they will be able to deliver. The front-end of our scuba diving site was rebuilt by IT Craft. They gave us a promise towards the end of July 2013, that it would be live on November 1, 2013.
If we didn't trust them, we wouldn't have funded the project because it didn't make any sense that this could happen. However, the site was live on November 1. It was disabled because the company had problems providing data, so we enabled it on November 8, just in time for the holidays, and we had our best holiday season ever. Nobody believed this was going to happen, but they delivered it on time. These are the two things that I like about them more than other agencies.
Is there anything IT Craft could have improved or done differently?
I'll share two points I see. First of all, I have found myself needing to shake up QA [quality assurance] every six or seven months in the beginning. Everything was fine and progressing, and then we had a release that was problematic. I had to shake up the QA, then everything was fine for another six or seven months, and then I needed to shake them up again. This happened twice in the past.
Since then, I've been doing two things. First of all, I have a monthly meeting with the QA team, so it's never happened again. I don't want to imagine what would happen if I were not doing these meetings. The second thing is, we have a lot of information today. QA has fresh work to do and not the same testing again and again, so it doesn't happen anymore.
The second bad experience was due to bad users, and this was before we hired them for the 24/7 monitoring. Now the monitoring is owning the website, and they take care of every outage immediately. They implement tools for 0 percent downtime. Before that, sometimes they were not reliable in getting emergency support calls. I complained many times about it, and then they gave us the 24/7 service. However, we realize that they're human beings, and we cannot keep them up all night. We eventually hired the sysadmin [system administration] division, and now it's 24/7 monitoring. I can say that, on a scale of one to 10, we are now at a nine for our satisfaction. We have never been satisfied with our technology team as we are today.
RATINGS
-
Quality
4.5Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS