Kellton Tech Solutions

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’ve experienced two main benefits from working with Kellton Tech Solutions: the consistency of their staff, and the excellent project management team. 

The communication, specifically of system requirements, between our main contact and the developers who are actually building and testing the portal has been excellent.

It’s clear that the team has a deep understanding of our product. We’re really happy with the platform they’ve developed.

How did Kellton Tech Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project managers are fantastic, and the developers are very skilled. There’s a lot of depth within the organization. When they don’t know something, they’re quite prepared to say it and find someone within the business who does. It’s very difficult to criticize them.

Everyone on the team is easy to communicate with. The developers use a screen sharing and board system that allows them to assign individual tasks. The project is divided into small, piecemeal assignments, allowing the developers to link smaller tasks into the larger system on a consistent basis, rather than doing it all in one go. We use Jira to track progress.

Hitting deadlines can be challenging when working on multiple modules, but Kellton Tech Solutions is consistently able to pull it off. If there is an extended deadline, there tends to be a very good reason, such as additional testing requirements or questions. If there’s a module that absolutely needs to go live by a certain date, the team provides extra resources to meet the goal.

For Kellton Tech Solutions, deadlines aren’t just a date — they have real meaning, and the team strives to meet them. That element sets them apart from other providers.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’ve been consistently impressed by their level of communication. 

Also, they’re very prepared and well-equipped to handle growth. They have impressive documentation in place to bring in new developers. As our team is growing consistently, they’ve given us the opportunity to develop the product at a faster pace.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve on design, but we understand that we didn’t hire them for that. We brought Kellton Tech solutions on board to focus on the code, and they’re doing exceptionally well.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Clients should go and seek out Kellton Tech Solutions.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Everything is monitored on a project by project basis with our client, and the primary KPIs are the schedule and budget. Internal to that, there’s velocity per sprint, but the overall project success is measured by customer satisfaction, a timely delivery, and whether it fits within the budget.

Kellton has succeeded on all of these fronts on every project we’ve gone through. We’ve been thanked very graciously by our client as well. A couple of the projects we’ve done have been the biggest successes they’ve had in software development. The end client is very happy, and that’s reflected in our continued relationship with Kellton. The team is being expanded even today.

How did Kellton perform from a project management standpoint?

One important thing is that Kellton has a presence in Ireland, as well as being offshore. Representatives and personnel from their company have traveled and worked with our client in Dublin for around three months at a time. Communication isn’t only electronic, though. They’re available on-site when needed, and their representation in the country is very useful. We have senior management from Kellton meet with us and our client once a month, as well as being available on the phone any time we want. In terms of day-to-day communications, there are standup meetings every day and scrum meetings every two weeks, conducted over Slack and Zoom.

The fact that they’re available whenever we need them is extremely useful, and the fact that they onshore means that we can meet regularly. We can get on top of anything, should any escalation be necessary, but that seldom happens. All the projects they’ve worked on have come in on schedule and under budget. We haven’t had any issues with project management at all.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality standard of the software they deliver is excellent and doesn’t need much in terms of rework. The communication is also good. The people in the teams we’ve worked with are quick to understand the requirements. It hasn’t been an issue we’ve experienced ourselves, but I know from other people who are outsourcing that language can be a barrier, and it really hasn’t been, which is great.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not at this stage. Everything’s gone smoothly with them over these last 16 months. That’s a long time for a honeymoon, but it’s still working out pretty well. The collaboration is steady and predictable, and I’m pretty happy with what they’ve done so far.  

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

One thing that helped was getting the offshore team to the client’s office for a period of time to understand the context, individuals, and organizational culture. I strongly recommend that people engaging an offshore team from Kellton bring the people onshore for an induction period. We’ve done that with around 70% of the team, for a period of around three months each time. We also visited Kellton in India, which was worthwhile as well.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The product that Kellton Tech helped us develop has won four awards. We had some issues with quality, which is a reason the team size increased. We realized we needed some quality assurance from their team. Once that was in place, we saw the quality improve. However, the delivery times were longer because the QA had to be implemented on their side before we saw it.

How did Kellton Tech Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

Initially, we didn’t have a project manager on the team, and we realized fairly quickly that we needed one. The project manager did a good job of managing their team.

During the project, our internal team had resource issues, meaning we couldn’t feed the right level of details to the Kellton Tech team. Since there were these issues with resourcing and design input from our side, they were kept waiting. Consequently, the implementation didn’t happen as quickly as it should have. Or, if it happened it wasn’t as we needed it because we hadn’t defined it clearly enough.

What did you find most impressive about them?

This is the first time I have worked with a partner in this area, so I don’t have a reference to compare them against.

One really positive aspect of the project has been their commitment. During the first phase of the project, which was a really intense period of development with a hard deadline, they worked more hours than I would have liked. They worked very hard and long days to complete it, and that was really appreciated.

In the end, we were a couple of weeks late, but had they not put in that effort, we would have been a couple of months late. We made changes in phase two to ensure they didn’t have to work in that way again.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Quality is the main thing they could improve. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the resources to back up the work they’ve done. 

Ordinarily, I would expect to do our own quality checks, but because of the time pressure of this project, we’ve had no opportunity to do that. So, we’re in an unpleasant situation of not knowing the code as the system is built out.

As a result, we’ve become aware that the code isn’t ideally structured. For example, we’ve seen evidence of sections of code being reproduced elsewhere rather than being reused. If we were to run the project again with more resources, we would have spent a lot more time reviewing the code quality. 

Also, their developers seem to be a little quick to mark a task as complete. Rather than doing their own testing and reaching a point where they’re confident in the code, they send it to QA right away. Within a few minutes, QA finds a problem and sends it back to the developer. This leads to longer development times. 

I asked the project manager and management team to encourage their team to take responsibility for their own development rather than developing something quickly, handing it off, and moving on. They should pay close attention, make sure it’s working correctly, and then hand it over for QA testing.