What was the scope of their involvement?
Originally, Pinnacle adopted ownership and development responsibilities for an existing BI portal. Since then, we've used them for additional web development and they’ve helped us transition to new data visualization tools. They use PHP for web. We moved from SAS to QlikSense for data visualization. QlikSense was new to Pinnacle, but they worked with another one of our vendors to embed QlikSense objects into the PHP interface that Pinnacle develops. Now they are building their competency with QlikSense.
For the first original development project we did with them, they developed a web interface that housed a survey. We provided very basic requirements based on vague ideas we had about what we wanted. We knew what we wanted the output to look like but weren’t sure how our systems would work. We flew them out to our office in Colorado for a daylong session together. We walked through our vision. They were able to break down the project and clarify how the data would work on the backend. At the end of the day, they had a clear enough understanding of what we were trying to do to provide a bid and project plan to us. We negotiated the scope a bit and, over the next eight months, they built the product.
The most critical thing that they’ve helped us with was a last-minute project. Our organization was moving to a completely different web platform and no one had realized that a specific functionality we had integrated into our website was going to be impacted by the switch. We were going to lose that service if we didn’t find an alternate plan. Pinnacle put together a project very quickly to help us design an interim web interface.
What is the team composition?
We primarily work with a dedicated developer and a project manager. The developer owns the vision and does most of the development but sometimes gives small pieces of projects to other colleagues.
How did you come to work with Pinnacle Solutions?
SAS switched our vendor and assigned Pinnacle to us. We didn’t search for firms or do a formal RFP. When we started other projects, we did look at other vendors to do some comparisons. We stayed with Pinnacle because we have a great working relationship with them, they have a great rate, and we trust their work.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent about $500,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in May 2014 and it’s ongoing.
Pinnacle has been able to understand and translate client vision into multiple products. They think systematically which results in higher-quality products and work well with another vendor on multifaceted projects.