Polycot Associates

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the product manager for a tech company, working with the Help Learn Community Department. In my role, I focus on our community products and seek to drive cross-customer knowledge exchange.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Polycot Associates?

We needed a platform that could host a large-scale conference for our software. This was a conference where over 10,000 attendees could gather and learn about the different ways users leveraged our software for their work. We wanted to have a website to go alongside the conference. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Benjamin (Co-Owner & Senior Developer) worked closely with our internal technical architect to come up with our conference’s platform. Together, they did all of the documentation to build out our original platform. This platform would host recorded video sessions from the conference. 

Since then, Benjamin has continued to stay on as a tech lead as our platform evolves. He primarily focuses on specific areas that are more complementary to the features that our other vendors have been working on. He oversees the infrastructure and additional systems that drive the experience on our conference site.

What is the team composition? 

We worked with one person consistently but have scaled to 3–4 whenever we’ve had to ramp up our efforts.

How did you come to work with Polycot Associates?

They’ve been working with us since before I started my position, so I’m not sure. 

How much have you invested with them?

For our latest project, we’ve spent about $120,000–$220,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

They’ve been working with us since May 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

From an infrastructure perspective, Benjamin’s leadership effort has improved our uptime to 99%, making the platform more reliable and available. He’s been critical in leading a lot of the performance and load testing efforts so that we could hit our service level agreements (SLAs) related to page-load times. Benjamin is accountable for ensuring that we can support increased loads of authenticated and non-authenticated users.

From a supplementary systems perspective, he’s improved the efficiency of our session content being updated to our site. 

How did Polycot Associates perform from a project management standpoint?

Despite having to lead the work, Benjamin is really good at providing regular updates on his various projects. Even if it’s just coordinating load testing, he’ll create a Jira ticket to document everything that’s been done. This ensures that there’s a central place to track everything.

Benjamin is proactive about sending over his recommendations, too. He mentions what our risks are, how we should scope something, and which tasks to prioritize. It goes to show that not only is he interested in making our program successful, but he’s also really clear about what we should be focusing on from an engineering perspective. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

My main experience has been with Benjamin, and I’ve found him to be the most dependable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great if Benjamin could have more project management support. Having to do all of those things can be a lot to handle, and he’s mostly a one-person team.

I’d also make sure that the additional resources brought on have enough time for onboarding. So far, those resources haven’t had the same experience as Benjamin because they don’t work with us day to day. They need to have enough time to become familiar with our project if they want to be efficient in delivering their tasks.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that you have good documentation around your projects and products. That way, Benjamin’s team has enough information to go off of so that they can hit the ground running.