QED42

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our organization, Ashoka, Innovators for the Public, is a 40 year old Non-profit organization that was started in Washington DC, but we now have offices in 30 odd countries and a presence in over 90 countries. I am in charge of web development of multiple websites that we create, manage and maintain for our work globally.

For what projects/services did your company hire QED42, and what were your goals?

We started using QED42's help when we needed a dedicated senior backend person to maintain the existing Drupal 7 website and to chart out the migration plan of our website from Drupal 7 version to the Drupal 8.

How did you select QED42 and what were the deciding factors?

We looked through multiple vendor options in India and QED42's involvement in the Drupal community and good reviews from other developers in the community were the deciding factors for selecting QED42.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Permanent basis: 1 Senior Backend Developer and Architect 1 Mid level Front end developer 1 Mid level backend developer Temporary short term projects: 1 Mid level Backend developer 1 Senior JS architect 1 Junior JS developer

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Traffic 43.6% higher traffic in May-Sept 2020 (122,967 vs 85,632 in May-Sept 2019) SEO/Organic Search 15% increase in organic search traffic in May-Sept 2020 (37,564 vs 32,745 in May-Sept 2019) AX Easier edits to metadata and Open Graphs for social media and SEO optimizations

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

Jira Teams Email and even whatsapp in case of emergencies

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The readiness to help in multitude ways was impressive. Estimations Project Management Tips Short term projects

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing at all!

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Senior Project Manager at the European Bartender School (EBS), the world's leading provider of bartender courses. I am responsible for delivering IT projects to support our on going expansion.

For what projects/services did your company hire QED42?

An IT project that expanded our current website into one that can produce franchise controlled subsites, giving franchisees an online marketing platform and control over their content. QED provided architecture / design guidance, development resource and QA / testing.

What were your goals for this project?

Business goal is to be able to quickly deploy websites for franchisee partners that they can use as a marketing tool.

How did you select QED42?

QED42 was chosen initially from a shortlist of 6 with some small project work. As they had proven to be very flexible and capable, QED42 was chosen for this larger project.

Describe the project in detail.

Main aspects were:

• Improve & simply user experience of our CMS.
• Create a method to easily deploy franchisee websites.
• Maintain integration with our other systems.
• Expand the current code base, not create another.

From the requirements provided by myself, QED42 provided a great proposal that covered all of the key aspects. With myself guiding / leading, QED42 developed, tested, oversaw migration and deployment.

What was the team composition?

With me as sole EBS contact point and project leader / technical consultant from the EBS side, QED42 provided a team consisting of account manager, technical architect, 2 back end developers, one front end developer and a QA tester.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Whilst we are still to deploy this phase in anger (awaiting business go ahead), so far extensive testing has proven that the development has been accurate and fulfils the requirements. All goals have been accomplished and EBS are happy with the result.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication with QED42 is excellent. If they have doubts or queries, they ask to ensure they fully understand the requirements. If potential issues arise, they raise them so we can arrive at the best solution together. Regular and on topic update meetings proved to be highly beneficial.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I required to have more technical and procedural input than would be considered normal from QED42's perspective. They were highly flexible in this regard and adapted perfectly to how EBS would like to run / control certain aspects of the project. On top of this, they maintained a very high level of professionality throughout the project.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'm always of the opinion that we can always improve. In this case I am nit-picking, but potentially the only thing would be to maybe improve sprint delivery definitions. But this is an exceptionally minor thing in this case.

Please describe your company and your position there.

This site is your non-partisan, one-stop portal to help you stay informed and get involved. By offering a unique way to participate in the political process, Votesane empowers democracy in a new way. Our site features news, data, and insights into Congressional members, political candidates and timely issues, and enables you to donate directly to the candidates and issues you care about. I am a founding member and the CTO of Votesane

For what projects/services did your company hire QED42, and what were your goals?

We hired QED to augment and help manage our development process. As a start up, we worked with a shoestring budget and a small staff, QED was the answer. Our goals were to update our site and continue changing and evolving. For a number of years now, QED and their team of professionals have helped to revamp, rework and process change requests on an ongoing basis.

How did you select QED42 and what were the deciding factors?

Our original introduction was through a mutual colleague. We opted to go with QED as the team was knowledgable, professional and capable. Additionally, the team was solutions focused and didn't try to upsell or over engineer based upon what we needed at the time.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We worked with QED to identify the project requirements as they stood, identify key areas for improvements, transition from older technologies into more modern approaches and have been able to consistently update and evolve following the ever changing flow of the American political populous.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We've worked with three different project managers and numbers developers including a 2 primary backend and 2-3 front end developers that have fairly consistently been allocated to our taskings.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The QED team has been very successful in helping us to maintain uptime and availability through a couple of election cycles as we constantly work to evaluate and identify where we'd like the next generation of the site to go.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We've operated in an agile approach during our entire engagement with QED and have appreciated the flexibility of this approach as we are constantly in flux. Its greatly contributed to the success of projects and our ability to meet scheduling goals

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

QED is a personality driven team. They have the right people and personalities aggregated to create a cohesive and effective team.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

My only concern is retaining institutional knowledge and consistency in staff. Over the years, turn over is going to happen. We've been through a few different team members and there is always a little ramp up time when transitioning. The team typically handles it well and more than accounts for the inconvenience of it.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder of a retail clothing delivery company. We provide delivery for retail stores to local customers.

For what projects/services did your company hire QED42, and what were your goals?

We hired them to create an e-commerce platform that would allow customers to shop their local stores online and receive it same day.

Our goals are in going but initially we needed a platform for stores to upload their products, manage stock and fill orders. We are currently working on an upload that builds off of the initial project with added features like customer memberships. Our goals have been met so far.

How did you select QED42 and what were the deciding factors?

A trusted friend recommended them several years ago. We initially went with a different company based in my state of Louisiana but the project was dropped by several teams due to lack of time.

Dipen reached back out to us a year later and it was perfect timing to find a new company to build it. I wish we would have chosen QED42 the first time around but overall, I’m glad we ended up finally choosing them.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

I’m not very technologically versed in languages of IT work. They have made the best of my limited knowledge and are very patient with me. My best description of our product is that we decided to build a web application that mirrors food delivery services in many ways.

We started with the MVP that did the basics of what I needed to be able to do...store load items and fill orders...customer able to shop and create accounts. Our phase 2 includes bulk uploading and customer memberships.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Two main people I worked with are Somedetta and Anand. Suma would be what I would call the project manager or leader. Anand is a developer. There are other people that work with me from time to time but those are the main people.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

While we are still building our system and helping our company get off the ground, our stores that have signed up and experimented with it are happy with how easy to use the system is.

Most of our stores figured out how to load products on their own. Customers that we show are happy as well and can not wait for it to be in their city. We are awaiting the start of our Phase 3 which will help us integrate with platforms such as Shopify and Lightspeed.

Store feedback as been that integrating would be a helpful feature. We are excited to be halfway that point. Any delay of the project has been on our end. We are happy with how fast they work with us to get us our product.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We email regularly. We have frequent calls over Zoom to talk in depth or review work. They have even schedule two extra calls when I had trouble understanding something.

Both calls produced positive outcomes and understanding of what I was struggling with. And once again, I am not amazing with technology. Their willingness to help me understand things has been a massive help to us.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

How fast they get a finished product to me and also a very generous price considering the depth of this project. As a start up company, I appreciate an affordable price.

We are very aware that the quality of their work goes above and beyond what my budget has been. Everyone we have worked with has given me their opinions and advice on each part of the journey. The consulting aspect they provide has been a blessing as well.

An extra opinion or idea is helpful on a project like this. I’ve even leaned on them for their personal opinions in some areas that I couldn’t decide on. And once again, they have helped me understand easily how to navigate everything they have built for me.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I cannot come up with a single area that needs improvement. I believe they do their job well.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of an online real estate listing site in a Latin American country, similar to Trulia or Zillow in the U.S. We bring in all types of selling areas within the real estate industry to our site in order to connect them to buyers.

What challenge were you trying to address with QED42?

I’m not a technical person, and didn’t have a team of good programmers in place. I started the project in 2013, and found Drupal to be the best fit for my project out of all the CMSs [content management systems] I looked at. QED42 works with Drupal, and I’d also checked out Drupal’s website to see all the vendors they had. I’d initially worked with companies in San Francisco, Denmark, and a few other European countries because my project didn’t start for the real estate system. It was, at first, a classified site similar to Craigslist.

The previous vendor did the work as I asked them to, but I had a few problems with them. The architecture they designed wasn’t very well-built, and it was, overall, too complex.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I traveled to India before doing anything remotely and meant Dipen [CEO, QED42] and his team in person, and I was very impressed. The company was very professional. It was very well-structured, and they had good engineers working for them.

We sat for six hours and discussed the project, and decided that I needed to pivot my entire startup idea onto something more focused. A simple classifieds website would be too hard to succeed with, so Dipen, being a technical person, helped guide me with his general business knowledge and experience. He assisted me in getting into the real estate business, and then we started working on the brand new website.

They used Drupal and many other services, depending on what the requirements were. In my case, they used Ionic to build the mobile app, which is a framework that helps build and deploy apps simultaneously to both iOS and Android platforms. They used many Google APIs for the real estate industry, including Google Maps. We also have a chat feature in the app for sellers and buyers to communicate. We also used Google’s Firebase system. For the frontend development, we used AngularJS. For app analytics, we’re used Localytics and Google Analytics.

Within six months, we had an MVP [minimum viable product] built. We had a mobile app which I didn’t have before, along with a very good site and product.

What is the team composition?

Dipen gave me extra attention, and I was present in India when he assembled the team. He accompanied the project from the start, not only as the project manager, but also as a point of escalation. They assigned two people on QA, and 4–5 engineers for building. There were also two UI designers who were very good. They scaled the team as needed.

How did you come to work with QED42?

I had the option to change vendors, so I interviewed others associated with Drupal. I wanted to work with a company in India because it would be easier for me to visit them, unlike the previous company that was based in the U.S.

I went to the directory online, and ended up interviewing 6–7 companies. When I came across QED42, I had a feeling they would be better because they immediately offered to do a free site audit. They checked everything and came up with a solution, and Dipen listened to my requests. Afterwards, they explained the programming issues to me in a way I could understand. Dipen really took his time and was patient with me.

How much have you invested with them?

I've spent in the lower six figures range.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working on the website in October of last year, and the project was completed in June 2017.

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

They helped me bring the product to life. My country is not a big market, but we’re growing at a rate of 300–400 new properties per week. The success of the company is our responsibility now. I have plans to enter a second phase of development, but I’m going to wait until I reach certain milestones. I want to get feedback from customers so we can develop new features to improve the product.

How did QED42 perform from a project management standpoint?

They were excellent. We were connected all the time through Slack and Jira. They utilized Agile methodologies, and managed all the sprints. I’m still in touch with the whole team, and when I send a message, they respond quickly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of people who work with them is impressive. I’ve had experiences working with other vendors, and it’s very different depending on whether there are in-house engineers or an outsourced team. When QED assigns a team to work on a project, they are invested in the timely release and good development of the product.

If there are any issues, I am confident talking to them. They solve my problems immediately. I have confidence and peace of mind with QED because of their team and attentiveness.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I have experience with two or three vendors, and out of those, I’ve had the best experience with QED42.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They brilliantly handle many types of customers, including enterprise companies and startups. I noticed that they like when a customer knows what they want, and when they’re invested in their own product and success. I suggest going into as much detail as possible. They’re going to work with their clients to arrive at the best possible decision. Once a new technology is adapted, it’ll be used for a long time.