Perfectial

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or impact of the engagement?

We got to the point where they were generating their own ideas. As they’re building the platform, they make suggestions to improve it. That’s been awesome. The first engineer we started with is still with us, and she’s a trusted leader of the team. We have a high level of trust and communication.

How did Perfectial perform from a project management standpoint?

They start work about midnight or 1:00 am our time, but I’m up until 3:00–4:00 am, so we have a high level of communication. It’s been a lot of fun. We use Jira, and that’s been pretty good. I haven’t managed that very heavily until recently, as the team has grown. It was very much unstructured. We would talk about feature sets through emails, and they would manage themselves to get the work done.

More recently, we’ve gotten into using Jira because the team has grown a lot, and the informal approach is a little harder. That has gone well too. I get to throw stuff in there, putting in as much detail as I can. I talk with them daily, and then we have a weekly, longer meeting. That’s an opportunity for me to voice priorities. They always have a big log of work they can be doing—little bugs and tweaks that they’re more than encouraged to look at when they have downtime. We also use Skype for communication and Bitbucket for code management.

What did you find most impressive about Perfectial?

They do very well with ambiguity, which I like. I don’t want to tell them how every detail has to look and act. I like to tell them what we have to get onto a page, and they figure out the best way to do it. More often than not, they do a great job at that. I like having that flexibility.

Are there any areas Perfectial could improve?

I don’t think there’s any area for them to improve. I think they’re doing a fantastic job. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We have had a functional build at the end of every sprint, with well-known features being added according to plan. We also had a well-known set of issues that were very clearly managed. I’ve had quite a lot of experience dealing with external entities, extended parties, and partners. There are a few things that really caught my attention. They are very good communicators, which is absolutely a must, especially if you’re not in the same building, let alone in different time zones. If they’re facing an issue in a design area, they will have a very well-written JIRA ticket with concise information. It’s very natural and straightforward to understand what they want and to then respond. I’ve had situations with other suppliers where it would take 3-days to finally understand exactly what we needed to work on. The clarity of communication and their use of tools is amazing. They use very good processes and are very much on top of it. That’s why we keep working with them and will continue to work with them. The more budget I have, the more work I can award to them.

How did Perfectial perform from a project management standpoint?

Their discipline is amazing. Speaking of discipline, they are truly agile when it comes to development. They really understand the way to go about it, breaking down stories into small, realistic user points. They understand the velocity to the point where if somebody gets sick or goes on a leave, they understand that if we had 60 points, for example, we’re only going to do 56. They’re usually right within 5%. Projects are dynamic. If you have very disciplined short stories, you’re at the top of your game. You understand how to manage the developmental organization and the project itself. If you communicate effectively, you can very quickly correct the course and adjust. We use Google Hangouts to communicate. Although not everything was right, it was very quick to see when things were not going right and very easy to adjust. That’s a basic principle of being Agile. You want visibility and the ability to react to it.

What did you most impressive about Perfectial?

They're fairly unique in their pragmatic use of Scrum and Agile techniques to run a project. Combine that with their communication skills and discipline of documenting succinctly, being clear, and having a very open and wide channel, and it’s really good to work with them. The real pleasurable thing is that they are genuinely nice people. They’re not abrasive or aggressive. It’s an open dialogue with them and they’ll always say what’s going on. If something is going to be blocking them, they take it in stride. They don’t get upset or bent out of shape. They are very much part of our team.

Are there any areas Perfectial could improve?

There were times when they would spend a large amount of energy making sure that we have a good definition. Sometimes, they would be lost. For example, in UX, we could see that sometimes there was a flaw. They wouldn’t be upset about it. They would go back and fix it. It would’ve been great if they had done it from the get-go, but it was a very small thing in a big way.

As we have been successful with them, we want them to be more a part of our extended staff and use our tools. Otherwise, it becomes a little more challenging when they’re developing an app and I find a bug or I want to do something specific, but they’re on a separate system than ours. We haven’t quite figured out how to make the integration better. They’re open to going either way, but there’s no one easy solution.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Perfectial?

There are two critical things. One is if you want to give something to anybody that’s outside of your office, make it as self-contained and well-defined a mission as possible. That makes it easier to build a team and to know when you’re successful. That also reduces the number of interdependencies. It’s really hard to say, “I’ll do development and you do testing,” or “I’ll do this part of the workflow and you do that part of the workflow,” because there’s too much dependency there. The second thing is having a good technical lead on your side to be a touch point. There’s going to be issues and challenges, so you don’t want five people exchanging emails. All you do is lose time.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I have had a number of experiences in the past with different software development providers, both nationally and internationally. Ultimately, I have ended up working with Perfectial more than with others because of their consistency and practical approach. I cannot remember any instances in which Perfectial promised something that they did not deliver or them managing expectations incorrectly. Unfortunately, I have found this to be a common issue with other organizations because of the remote nature of the work, or the type of relationship we had. Perfectial has a good, broad knowledge of different technologies as well as strong project management skills.

How did Perfectial perform from a project management standpoint?

Perfectial always delivered on time and on budget. We have worked through a mixture of project-based and time-and-materials engagements. We are currently working on a fixed-price project with Perfectial, but we are discussing other activities that will be time and materials because of the less-defined nature of the work. During our startup work, the engagement also leaned towards time and materials. We had a great scope, but it was not defined to a level that would allow Perfectial to maintain a fixed price.

We have used the Atlassian stack during our three engagements, namely JIRA and Confluence, for general collaboration. On a smaller project, Perfectial also used Pivotal Tracker.

What distinguishes Perfectial from other providers?

Perfectial's ability to work independently has been uncommon, relative to other outsourcers. Very often, in my experience, I had to give developers exact specifications. Perfectial can also work using this approach but, for our current project for example, there was no time for putting together a fully documented set of requirements. We went through a two-day brainstorming process around those requirements. Perfectial was able to start from there and deliver it.

Is there anything Perfectial could have improved or done differently?

Given my experience with Perfectial, an improvement would be in terms of even stronger project management. This depends on each project's requirements and they have been better than other providers even in this respect, but I would generally like for Perfectial to be more involved.

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

I don’t have any hard statistics that I use. SLoC is a terrible way to evaluate development teams.  And function points are really squishy. I track story points. There has been a steady climb to good number – about 1.1 story points per developer per day with minimal regression defects. It helps that our unit test coverage is about 60% and we have over 1,000 Selenium tests for the code base so the developers know quickly if they have broken something.

There is another very soft metric that I can point to. We’ve done well over 300 demos to prospective clients. We have been invited back to continue the discussion in over 98% of those cases. If the product looked terrible or did not work, that would not be the case.

When working with Perfectial, is there anything you’d consider unique about their approach or development methodology that distinguishes them from other vendors?

Many firms are wedded to their processes and tool kits. In contrast, Perfectial is extremely flexible in terms of adhering to my preferred toolkit and development process. They’re willing to bend over backwards to do what the client wants. The CTO, Ivan Kohut, actually came over to visit and spend some quality time with us to get to know us. And our team lead at Perfectial came over for three weeks to work shoulder-to-shoulder with us.

In retrospect, are there areas you think they could improve on as a service provider?

Everyone says the same things about external development partners -- they should work faster with higher quality and cost less.  I think that is more of an aspirational goal than a criticism.  In terms of actual critical feedback, I really don’t have anything significant.  There is one small thing.

When we were first starting to work together, I wanted to interview everyone before the project kicked off.  Initially they put too many developers in front of me whose English was not adequate to pair with someone in the United States who wasn’t able to speak Ukrainian or Russian.  It took us a little while to get to a point where they understood that language skills are not optional.  You may have someone who’s technically brilliant but if s/he can’t communicate, s/he can’t be on the team.  I will say with the last five or six hires, I haven’t been introduced to anyone who wasn’t proficient in English.