MojoTech

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We’re the United Way of Connecticut, and we run the State of Connecticut’s 211 service, along with about six or seven other state programs. We’re a nonprofit, but we’re not the United Way donations centers. We’re more of a service center, and we provide services to the citizens of Connecticut.

What is your position?

I’m the chief information officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

We received a grant to rewrite the 211 search engine. 211 is kind of a referral service, so typically when you dial 211, you call us with a problem, and we’ll refer you to one of 40,000 different services that are offered in the state. Most of them are free, some are subsidized, and some have specific eligibility requirements that must be met.

The challenge was that all of the various products have really crappy web search engines. We wanted to stand out, and we wanted a search engine that worked more like a person instead of something that you had to know all of the answers to before you could find anything. It didn’t make sense the way it was built before and it wasn’t intuitive for users. We wanted to change that.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

It was built entirely with Ruby on Rails, which we had already been using. We were typically using MySQL, but we ended up going with Postgres on this one. There were two teams working on our project; we had a design team and a development team. The development team consisted of two to three people, and the design team was one to two. We gave them complete authority over whom to assign to our project. We had daily stand-ups and it was an agile project so we were heavily involved throughout the entire process.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

We looked for Ruby on Rails development companies, found them, and then visited them. That was pretty much the process for selection. We liked the fact that they were somewhat local to us.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was in the range of $140,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project duration was around three months, and it is now complete. That project was actually our second engagement with MojoTech. We had a 211 childcare search engine that we did before that, and right now I’m awaiting a grant. If that comes through, there’s going to be a third engagement with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

There was a definite increase in the use of the site. We gauge it on how many people visit and how many searches they perform. I’m guessing it was about a 25% increase in use. We didn’t have any issues with defects or malfunctions that needed resolution after the launch, which was very impressive. We weren’t expecting that, but it was great.

The one thing they did very well, and the one thing I learned from them, is that they worked with our business extremely well and got their team very engaged in the project. This is something we had been struggling with, even though we had an agile development team. We’ve always had trouble getting the business engaged, and they taught us a thing or two about our own business and how to leverage that. We used a lot of those lessons, and continue to use them today, with our internal project development.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

We had extended it a little on the end, but that was because there was another feature we wanted and some extra money became available. They did complete it within the time they had estimated and the deadline we gave them.

We used both Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker for that project. We had already been using Pivotal Tracker, but Basecamp was new to us. We liked it so much that we bought a subscription for our company, too. They develop on their own server using Heroku, but I wanted to host it locally, so they also worked with our technical staff to get that migrated successfully.

What distinguishes MojoTech from other providers?

We had a session with them when we invited the business in, and IT went in with them. They were able to think of things we would have never thought of, and ways that people could search. I don’t know if it’s an outside perspective, or that they’re very clever, but they were quickly able to figure out what we needed, in ways that we would have never thought of. That’s why I keep going back to them. They’ve been invaluable.

Is there anything MojoTech could have improved or done differently?

The only issue we ever had with them was during the first 211 project. We switched developers, and that was a little bit of a challenge. When you put a new developer on a project, there’s a little bit of a ramp, a learning curve involved. It turned out okay, but it created a little discontinuity in the project. That’s not their typical way of doing business; in fact, we had a break in the project for a month on our side, and when we came back we didn’t have access to the same guy that we did beforehand. Although it’d be great if I could lock down their employees, it’s something that’s understandable. I know that, if we had gone continuously without that break, we would have had access to that the same guy.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are an online platform that allows independent marketers and various other individuals to launch or create custom apparel campaigns, and retail products that they create for other people.

What is your position and responsibilities?

I am the director of internal products, which is really product management for production and production operations related to systems.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

We started our engagement with them approximately eighteen months ago and, initially, we were transitioning our entire front-end application from PHP to Ruby on Rails. We had a rather complicated set of operations and productions systems, and we asked them to rebuild that entire platform with Ruby on Rails. We had already made the decision to use Ruby on Rails before engaging them with MojoTech. They had extensive knowledge of Rails so it made sense to bring them onboard.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We have an extensive Ruby on Rails development team internally, so we didn't just outsource our work to them. We brought them on as partners to be responsible for a subsection of the migration. They completed that initial scope of work in three to six months. We then signed a long-term service level agreement with them, to have them continue to be our primary development team responsible for the ongoing development of our internal systems for operation and production.

We had a team of MojoTech engineers, which ranged in size at times from six to 10 people, who worked on a wide assortment of projects to expand the scope of our operations systems. We had a full-time project manager assigned to us consistently up until just a couple of months ago. We used Pivotal Tracker as a project management tool. We have a dedicated QA [quality assurance] specialist from MojoTech who has been the primary QA resource for all of our operations in production systems for the last year.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

We found MojoTech online through some research.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I came in right after the initial engagement ended, and they had moved into the long-term engagement. I guess the original engagement was destined to be four months, maybe five, so probably $1.5 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

The initial project was probably completed around May 2014. The relationship with them is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I don't know that I can give you any quantitative metrics. What I can tell you is that they were the difference between us being able to maintain a tremendously fast growth rate and completely falling off the horse. They've built tools that allowed us to sustain a growth rate of several hundred percent. Overall, I loved working with MojoTech, and I would recommend them to anybody. They were probably one of the most professional development teams that I've worked with in 30 years in development.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

From a project management perspective, they went so far beyond in terms of providing day-to-day support when we didn't have an internal support structure in place. Everyone just knew that the project manager was a great asset. If we could have hired the project manager or probably any other MojoTech person directly, we would have happily done so.

What distinguishes MojoTech from other providers?

They work very well in a collaborative setting. The way we engaged with them was not their typical business model. Once they became part of our extended team, it wasn't their typical business model. The fact that they could adapt readily to a different business model is definitely unique among their competition. For the last year, they've worked in an environment wherein we were completely agile, and they were very comfortable working in that environment. This was fantastic because it meant that they were familiar with our development methodology and were able to get up-to-speed quickly.

Is there anything MojoTech could have improved or done differently?

I think the only less than positive feedback that we might provide is that they are such strong process engineers that it really hurts them to do something sub-optimally. They're good at weighing cost benefits, but if the cost benefit is overwhelming in one direction, and the client wants it to be in another direction, they're willing to make that shift, but they make it very clear that they see things differently. They don't ever take change requests in a vacuum. They really want to understand the business logic behind any given technical decision. They're willing to do it, but you have to be clear about what you want.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I work for a division of a large health insurance company. We are an affiliate subsidiary that provides population health technology services – a lot of care management, hospital information technology solutions, consumer population health solutions – things along those lines.

What is your position and responsibilities?

We used to have an incubator business where we would start new companies internally, and build those up. I used to be in charge of the incubator. Right now, as of May, I just moved to work for one of the companies that moved through the incubation process. At the time of working with MojoTech, I was the director or head of the incubator and was in charge of working on bringing a specific product to market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with MojoTech?

We had to launch a brand new product within a year. We had the concept pretty fleshed out, we had interested pilot customers, but we did not have any developers. What we really needed was development support. We had an interesting model in that we have a centralized devOps [development and operations] team here that we needed to use. We wanted to find a vendor who could be collaborative in terms of bringing in some of their staff to work with some of our staff, to help us build the product, and then be able to launch it into the pilot.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

What we ended up doing was actually using an in-house designer that we had, so MojoTech didn't do any of the visual design for us. They provided two front-end developers and one back-end developer to work with our team, and their developers were fantastic. We had one developer on our team who wasn't probably as experienced, so they helped to bring him along with it as well, and provided some thoughts around the types of setups that we should use in terms of our database. They were mostly responsible for the development or engineering of the application.

In the very beginning, because we had a dispersed team, I wanted to make it more of a cohesive unit. I didn't want it to be an "us versus them" situation. We had an in-person kickoff with them and our dev and design team. Throughout the course of the project, we tried to meet in-person quarterly, just to make sure everyone was on the same track and that MojoTech understood some of our business context. That helped from the technology strategy side as we were thinking about resources.

We used Ruby on Rails for our server side development and AngularJS on the front-end and JavaScript, too. For the back-end, we are definitely a Ruby on Rails shop, so that was kind of a given. When they looked at the visual design elements of the application that we wanted to build, they had to use some of the other technologies on the frontend to be able to show the visualizations and make the application work in the way that we had envisioned. They provided their recommendations to our devOps team, there was agreement on those recommendations, and they moved forward from there.

We have not expanded the scope of their involvement since this initial project, but that is more due to the nature of what's happening with our business. We no longer have the incubator up and running. If we were doing that, I would definitely consider them for another project.

How did you come to work with MojoTech?

They actually came as a referral from a colleague. I believe that he had either been contacted by them or had known of them and felt that they could be an interesting firm to consider. We originally were looking for both design and development support, and we knew they had both of those capabilities.

We were also considering a handful of other firms in addition to MojoTech. We were really impressed with their development skills and the fact that they had design expertise that we could leverage if we needed to, and just their flexibility around the model, being able to work with some folks on our internal staff, but also be able to provide additional staff as needed to ramp up during this process.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I think probably about a million dollars in a year and a half.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started around January or February of 2014, and was completed May 2015.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

For us, it was very successful because we were able to launch our pilot last September with two customers. We were able to start from nothing and get our product up and running with data available in it, which was great. From the process, what we heard from our customers is that they really felt the application worked quickly. They felt that the visualizations were helpful and helped bring their data to life, which is good for them.

I would say on our side, the way that the team worked in terms of testing. They built tests into the code base to check for things on a regular basis. We didn't develop something out, and then have to go back and QA [quality assurance] test it and realize there are all these mistakes. It was something that was done on an ongoing process, which I think was helpful and allowed us to move at the speed in which we did. We used an agile method to go through the development project. We had two-week sprints, and the project lasted seven months. The work was completed within the allotted sprint time.

Because we were building a new product with a development partner, we knew that we wanted to launch our MVP [minimum viable product] first. We were able to do that in the timeframe we wanted. Then, from that, we wanted to get feedback from the customer and then be able to make changes to the product once they actually started using it. We had anticipated that, after September, we wanted to continue the process and make changes based on the customer feedback.

How did MojoTech perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Rally software for project management, so everyone was leveraging that from the sprints. Not really for project management, but usually a form of communication between our team and theirs. They were always right on top of their deadlines and nothing went over budget. I was very impressed with how agile and flexible their team was.

What distinguishes MojoTech from other providers?

The quality of MojoTech's developers was fantastic. They were really eager and excited about the project, and they were able to offer some good suggestions to us, just because we didn't have a strong tech team in place. They were able to provide some of that guidance to me as I was sorting through different issues and trying to figure out from a business sense what we needed to do and how technology could play into that. I found that helpful.

They were also very collaborative. We had a very interesting model in terms of how we had to do the staffing with our team versus their team. With anything new that's kind of being incubated, we had a couple of ups and downs to the process with our budget, and we needed to find creative ways to make things more efficient. They were always willing to provide those solutions and help us through that, which I also found very helpful.

Is there anything MojoTech could have improved or done differently?

They had some turnover on their team and messaged it to us. I would have loved to find out maybe a little bit earlier, so that we could have made some other contingency plans, but we were able to fill it in. With that turnover, there's always getting someone new up to speed and bringing them into the project. Maybe a little more efficiency on that would have been helpful, but it wasn't anything that derailed us or was a huge issue.