Oshyn

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

There is no comparison to our legacy environment. Online sales have increased by 1,000% or more. Previously, 80% of orders were processed through the phone, but most of those transactions now come almost exclusively through the new environment.

How did Oshyn perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re phenomenal and always available. A lot of their developers work in Ecuador, which is three hours ahead of us, but all of their business analysts, designers, and support staff are in the Los Angeles area.

We worked in sprints and could view the entire process, from planning to QA testing and production. There were daily status call updates at the beginning, which have since changed to two calls each week. We provided feedback and they gave us information about any changes. We used Confluence and Jira to store documentation and submit tickets.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We have an almost familial relationship with them. They’re very involved and feel like friends. They took ownership of the product and are very knowledgeable about our process. The partnership with them is very special.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No; it all worked so well.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them all the pertinent data, copy, environment, customer scenarios, and user case studies, and make sure they have a complete picture of your company, your process, and your customers. If you don’t give them what they need, you may not get what you want. That said, they were interested and reached out to get all the information that they needed to complete our project.

In terms of results, could you share any metrics, statistics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve done?

I don’t have a lot of testimonials. What we’re seeing is a lot of traffic from the CTA website to the member benefits website, which was kind of what we were hoping for when we built the separate site: that we would have more details available and more flexibility. When we see that traffic, it tells us that people have been enticed, and are pursuant of more information.

How do you think Oshyn has performed on this project?

I thought they performed very well on the first project because we were trying to do single sign on, and because we were attempting to link several different websites being administered by different teams, using different content management systems. There were a lot of external dependencies involved. If you’ve ever worked on a project like this, you know that external dependencies are the most difficult ones to mitigate during the process. Oshyn demonstrated a lot of flexibility in this area, and they were consistently doing everything in their power to maintain the agreed project timeline.

Do you think Sitecore has performed adequately for your business needs?

Yes, I do. We had a lot of trouble with Sitecore to begin with because we hadn’t worked with it and didn’t have a whole lot of experience with CMS. It’s not that easy to find ways to get up to speed on Sitecore.

We’re very happy with the fact that we’ve been able to use Sitecore for the main website as well as the mobile pages. Having all of these platforms able to deliver the same dynamic content to the user while still tracking key information on the backend has been an incredible advancement for us. 

We’re also happy with Sitecore from the point of view that we’ve been able to run fairly lean with it. We haven’t had to dedicate enormous resources to its maintenance and operation.

In retrospect, are there areas you think Oshyn could improve upon, or are there things that you’d do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

Yes, one of the things that I learned along the way was how much time and effort it can take to get content built inside of a CMS. Oshyn’s strength is really more in building from the foundation and templates and not putting that in. I would probably, before going into a project like this again, make sure that I had somebody who was more up to speed in terms of getting that stuff in quickly because it’s probably not efficient to pay a consultant to do it regardless.

Other than that, they use a sprint approach. I think the sprint approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and they’re pretty much the same thing. In one way, it limits the flexibility in that the teams that are assigned to do various tasks are only assigned for set chronological periods. That can be problematic when you’re hitting dependencies that you don’t have control over. But, at the same time, I think that it also puts a framework around the project and forces it to keep moving forward, which is always good.