Quintagroup

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a real estate broker. I was in the process of designing an online auction marketplace platform called Real Estate Brokerage Auctions.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

I teamed up with Quintagroup to design my platform for online real estate auctions.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Quintagroup was in charge of designing all the agent and broker templates that I gave them as a membership plan. Also, they were in charge of the backend software for the different types of auctions — online, direct offer, insider, and seal bid. Then, they were going to handle the payment through a payment gateway.

What is the team composition?

I worked with four people. Alex (Engagement Manager) was the project manager, and then there were two people that were in charge of the software and design.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

I researched online and came across them. They said they had experience in developing online auction software, and they had a very impressive website and good reviews.

I called someone in Florida that had worked with them. He said he was happy, but he had wished he had gotten a consultant because they weren’t familiar with commercial real estate, so they just put together something that wasn’t what he needed.

How much have you invested with them?

I thought I had spent $95,320, but in December, Alex told me to send them more money. In total, I spent $126,320.

What is the status of this engagement?

I worked with them from October 2020–February 2021.

How did your relationship with the vendor evolve?

We signed a contract when we started. It said that they would bill me as items were completed, but I don’t think Alex was looking at the scope of things completed, so he sent me a bill each month. However, they were far behind budget and scope.

When I started to have my concerns, they’d already charged me $126,000, but they’d only completed $51,000 of legitimate work on the site. I hoped they could reimburse me $40,000, but they told me they couldn’t give me anything because the company had already spent the money. They charged me for services that weren’t rendered yet and excused themselves by saying that was the way their billing worked. However, the contract said the budget and scope were charged based on when things were completed.

I haven’t had an answer to that, so I haven’t been able to solve it.

How did Quintagroup address the challenges that arose?

Alex was nice; he tried to figure it out. He told me they could provide the features that weren’t completed because a refund wasn’t an option. He claimed that they had more than 20 people involved on the project, but I never saw them. Now, I have a website that’s just not worth $120,000 of work. I asked them if my lawyer could see them, but they never responded back.

Describe the impact this engagement has had on your business.

I contacted another software company, and they looked at their site and told me they hadn’t done much. I ended up switching to them, and so far they’ve only charged me $40,000 to do exactly what Quintagroup did, and they’re miles ahead of them.

I had $220,000 set aside to invest in this project, and Quintagroup pretty much took my money, because there’s nothing that the new software developer can use from that site. I’m out for nearly half of my budget, but at least this company knows what happened and is willing to do it better and for a lot less.

How was project management handled?

The biggest thing was that they charged and overcharged me, and part of it was my fault. I had so much trust in Alex. When I started seeing that things just weren’t getting done or looking right, that’s when I started questioning them.

Is there anything that the vendor did well or that you would consider a strength?

Their strength was probably communication, but their weakness was honesty.

What advice do you have for clients with similar needs to yours?

Ask for multiple references or sites that you can go to, and then call people and ask them if the company was knowledgeable about your area. I had to educate them on a lot of things, but I finally saw that they weren’t getting it.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and COO of a fintech company that builds treasury technology for hedge funds.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

We hired them for their software development services.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Quintagroup sourced one person for us that we use as a full-stack Python developer. In his role, he is our leading backend Python developer.

He is building our software using different frameworks and databases. He is building the tech stack that we’re disturbing to clients.

What is the team composition?

We work with the one developer at the moment.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

My co-founder came across them through one of his contacts. I don’t know the exact answer.

How much have you invested with them?

We pay about $70,000 a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2019.

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

We see the output of the work every day, which is reliable and stable. The high-quality work is turned around very quickly. All of our in-house developers have great feedback. The developer is organized, knowledgeable, and responsive.

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

The work is set from our side. Up until a month ago, he was working on it alone, but now, we’ve hired a few in-house developers that are interacting with him. There’s great communication through email and chat. We also speak through Zoom daily.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Quintagroup cares a lot about how everything is going. With each monthly bill, they’ll check in and see how things are going. They care if their clients are happy.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not that I can think of.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They have a broad range of skills. Be as clear as possible regarding technical requirements.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the founders of Exchange That Loan. We’re a marketplace where lenders can buy and sell loans.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

We’ve relied on them to execute our shift from a consulting service to an online marketplace model. We needed them to build a platform for transactions.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They built our online marketplace from the ground up using Python and Django. We wanted a polished frontend and a functional backend. As our requirements, we used an FDIC-issued RFP detailing what the ideal platform would be for loan exchanges.

They delivered the first-stage MVP around a month ago, and we went back to implement changes, updates, and fixes. We’ll be starting beta-testing soon.

What is the team composition?

I have three full-time teammates and 3–4 part-time members. The team consisted of a frontend engineer, a few backend engineers, a DevOps specialist, and a designer.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

One of their marketers reached out to my co-founder via LinkedIn. They’d built online market solutions for large enterprises in the past. It was perfect timing because we were already considering building our own platform.

How much have you invested with them?

We’re just under $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in November of last year, and our partnership is ongoing.

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

The functionality of the platform is excellent. I’m particularly impressed with the work they did on our admin dashboard, but the other dashboards they created —for sellers and buyers, respectively — are also great. We’re really happy with how they’ve materialized the platform’s features.

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been very easy to work with. They’re very communicative; we talk every day on Slack. In Ukraine, they’re on a martial-law lockdown during the pandemic, but they still manage to keep us up to speed. They were also very understanding vis-à-vis our financial difficulties, where we had some contracts canceled because of Covid-19. We’ve been able to come to flexible agreements with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their overall professionalism is stellar. On top of keeping them on board for maintenance, we’re planning to secure them for continued collaboration.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re excellent at constructing backend functionalities, but they could probably be slightly stronger on the frontend side. I only say that because the frontend is important for us from a marketing and branding perspective; since we’re only at the MVP stage, this isn’t a significant criticism.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Clearly and precisely define what you want. Collaborate with them to create workflow charts, to ensure that you’re getting the functionalities and flows you really need.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of a creative IT company that builds various solutions for both public sector clients and private entities. One of our branches focuses on intranet sites, and another deals with automation and machine learning.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

We partnered with Quintagroup to help develop solutions for our clients using the Plone CMS.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Quintagroup acts as a remote extension of our development team. Together, we’ve built about 25–30 solutions for our clients, each with a unique business challenge. All projects involved using Plone, which is a specialized CMS platform that we’ve been using for years, as well as Python, HTML, and JavaScript.

What is the team composition? 

We’ve been involved with between 6–10 resources over the years, but our account manager has remained the same.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

We chose Quintagroup because they were visible within the open source community and had resources who were specialized in Plone. It’s difficult to find good Plone developers since it’s such a unique platform, but Quintagroup has been creating tools and plug-ins for a while.

As for the process, we had a few conference calls before visiting them in Ukraine. We spent a few days together and decided that we were a good fit.

How much have you invested with them?

In total, we’ve probably spent around $200,000–$400,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with them from January 2007–December 2017. The engagement ended as the projects transitioned into more of a maintenance role.

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

It’s hard to give any individual hard metric, but Quintagroup delivered consistently throughout all of the projects, and client satisfaction was high. They followed plans and were easy to work with thanks to their no-nonsense attitude. 

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

We mostly used GitHub and LiquidPlanner to coordinate. The team was always willing to follow existing processes and tools, which made it easy to bring them on as a remote partner. They’re adaptive, quickly finding the right resources to complete tasks on time. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve done a lot for the open source community. It’s clear that they have a mutual interest in growing the platform and making solutions that are good for all, not just building something specific to a client. That’s why we recommend Quintagroup as a development partner.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were smaller things that occurred on a more personal level. Some consultants were less mature than others.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?
 
When working with a remote team, it’s important to communicate with them so that you’re on the same page. You can’t fix everything through a Jira ticket. But you can get a better solution by establishing a personal relationship with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We provide training and consulting worldwide. I'm the president of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

We started our business about 15 years ago, and we needed a team to develop our initial website.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They developed our website and maintained it for about ten years. Additionally, we did at least two or three rounds of major enhancements to the site. They added and edited content, and they added a variety of features that included video functionality and intranet capabilities for our clients.

We provided them with a fair amount of detail for each project, and they asked a lot of questions. We iterated through each project, and they made sure they clarified everything to avoid any mistakes. The CMS they used wasn't hard coded, and all their designs were stored in a database.

What is the team composition?

I worked with six or seven people over the years. We had one principal point of contact, and we communicated with a few individuals from their design and editing teams.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

A friend of mine had a good experience with them and referred them.

How much have you invested with them?

Over the years we worked together, we spent about $35,000-$40,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership began around August 2005 and wrapped up in December 2015.

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

The website was designed to all our specifications, and it met all our requirements. It was well designed and reliable, and we had a good uptime record. We were very satisfied with the work they did, and the only reason we moved away from them was because we changed the platform to WordPress.

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

Our principal project manager did an excellent job. We used Basecamp to post our requirements, and they tracked each task as they completed it. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They had a real flair for design and a high degree of responsiveness. They were a conscientious team, and they cared about our opinions. They listened to us and met all our needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When we first started, their English wasn't the best. That was only an issue for the first two or three years, and they improved dramatically over time. They eventually hired a bilingual content editor that acted as an interpreter. That eliminated all our communication difficulties. That was almost 15 years ago, and I don't think it’s an issue anymore.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We had no difficulties working with them, so I don't have any advice to make the experience better. I would recommend them highly to any prospective client.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I represent Transparency International Ukraine, which is the Ukrainian chapter of the international anti-corruption movement. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

We needed to develop a procurement and public sales system for our NGO.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with them on two projects—the ProZorro public e-procurement system and the ProZorro public sales system. The public procurement system is a full-scale system which now serves our government. It has about 30,000 procurement entities and about 200,000 bidders in the system. ProZorro Sale is a system that sells governmental assets.

They were the main developers on a multi-party team for a minimum viable product. They road-mapped the implementation and developed the backends in Python. The team is still developing modules having just finished the pilot project and transferring the tool to our government. 

What is the team composition?

They have about 60 people. We don’t work with everyone as we mostly interact with business analysts and lawyers. We don’t work directly with the software developers.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

We had a tender process.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent over $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2014 and the partnership is ongoing.

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

The systems serve more than 230,000 users in terms. As government-owned entities, the systems have helped conduct more than 2 million online tenders in the last three years. 

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

We haven’t had any problems with them. We communicate through Slack, email, and Google Hangouts.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re not the best partners because, as an NGO, we are funded by donors, and sometimes we have to postpone payments to them. Quintagroup understood the situation and worked as a reliable partner even though we sometimes failed to pay on time, even with delays of several months.

They are not just expert software developers. They are innovative and feel passionate about public procurement. The team also suggests features to make it more user-friendly and more efficient.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They are sometimes too concerned about quality, more than we needed or requested. It is sometimes hard to get into deployment with certain components because of their QA. They occasionally postpone the release because they aren’t sure that all testing is complete, but generally, it is fine.

They have good leadership in the organization, but most of their knowledge is concentrated within that leadership. They need to increase the number of people who are fully aware of everything they do as it could cause issues if they continue to grow.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They are a reliable partner. They understand what needs to be done, and all tasks are clearly articulated to the team.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing associate for a Salesforce software consultancy. I oversee design projects and lead our website redesign.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

Our website was 10 years old, and we wanted to upgrade to the most recent version of Plone. We needed a partner to migrate our content from Plone 4 to Plone 5 and employ a new site template.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I built the design for the new site and provided the draft and wireframe to Quintagroup. They then built out the actual theme, making sure that all of our content stayed linked to the original location and remained active. Part of our website is a blog, so we wanted users to still be able to find the content in its original location, but we also wanted to change the UX/UI of the whole site.

Quintagroup also helped upgrade the site and migrate everything to the latest version of Plone. Updated features include adding testimonials, podcast customizations, and making the site mobile responsive.

What is the team composition?

We originally talked to a sales representative who set up the scope, budget, and timeline of the project. After the initial phase, we then worked with our project manager and a developer.

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

My company had worked with Quintagroup on a past project, and they’re one of the only agencies that works with Plone.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked on this project from February–June 2018.

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

The new site has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our team, clients, and community peers. They say it’s much easier to navigate and looks a lot better.

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

Quintagroup was responsive and stayed in touch even after the site launched; they wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. We mainly communicated via email because of the large time difference. We sometimes had Skype meetings, like when the site went live, but not too often. They always responded within a reasonable timeframe.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The project manager translated all of our specific requests into tangible changes on the website. They understood what we wanted and made sure to accomplish those goals, solving any problems that popped up.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Be aware of the limitations that come from working with an overseas developer. They may not be immediately accessible, but they’re still a great partner. Have clear expectations for what you want and track the project on your end, too.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a predictive insights company who provides analytics to manufacturers and brands about what products they should make and the risks/opportunities of going into new categories. I am the CEO of the company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Quintagroup?

We hired Quintagroup to help scale, optimize, and extend our data acquisition system AND to build a dashboard so that we have better visibility into the system itself.

What were your goals for this project?

(#1) The main goals for the project were to help build a minimal set of metrics (KPIs) that would enable us to track the performance acquisition system. (#2) Update and add features to the acquisition system improve its performance and increase the amount of data we are acquiring and processing.

How did you select this vendor?

They reached out to us at the right time, we had multiple introductory calls with their team, they shared references. We were very impressed by their team and our initial conversations with them.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Quintagroup (QG) not only provided the development work, but also worked with our leadership to help build out the product roadmap and allocated the project management capabilities to make sure everything stayed on track. Initially, QG worked with our team closely to understand our objectives and did a deep dive on our codebase, this then enabled them to help successfully re-articulate our technical roadmap and built out the execution plan. They then built out a Cloudwatch dashboard on AWS and created the logging for each KPI/metric that helped us gain visibility into our system. QG also developed numerous features in our system to help increase it's performance and stability.

What was the team composition?

We primarily worked with about 4 people: a fractional CTO, 2 FT developers, and a product manager.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

It is hard to understate the impact of the Cloudwatch dashboard they developed for us. Prior to this development, we had near-zero visibility into the performance of our system. This enabled us to see if/when our system went down and where problems were occurring. These insights enabled our team to be massively more data-driven and better use our time/resources to address issues. QG also built tooling that automated some time-intensive tasks for our data-ops team that saved them double-digit hours per week.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project management system implemented by QG was incredibly effective. We utilized the agile framework, planning out sprints in advance on Github (which we used exclusively). For planning, we prioritized tasks based on a size score and priority score based points system. This helped us make sure we fit the most value into each sprint. I have since implemented their planning framework into other parts of our business.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was very impressed by QG's ability to communicate very effectively. I think there is a fear sometimes as a business owner working with remote teams in other countries. Their team did a tremendous job of quickly understanding our business objectives and our system with minimal guidance or oversight. Especially considering the complexity of our underlying system, their ability to quickly ask the right questions and get to the meat of the matter was exceptional and appreciated. This strong insight was followed with strong execution.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Frankly, they are strong across the board. I do not have any strong recommendations for improvements.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and shareholder of a health organization. We work with veterinary medicine and veterinary products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Quintagroup?

I needed help with web development for our veterinarian business. We needed to be able to link veterinarian prescriptions with the correct veterinarian and veterinary clinic, as well as the French database of veterinarian drugs.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project has included application development, software development, and e-commerce development. 

They developed an e-commerce platform using Python and JavaScript. They also developed a database because we need to record each time that we sell any veterinary drugs with a prescription. In addition, their work included creating a health management application where we can record sales and vet prescriptions.

What is the team composition?

I worked with a project manager, and there were about 10 other people who worked on the project. 

How did you come to work with Quintagroup?

A friend of mine had recommended Quintagroup to me. I began working with them a long time ago when I was at a different company (where they developed a healthcare software and application).

How much have you invested in them?

I have spent around €300,000 Euros so far (approximately $330,662 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in 2013, and the work is still ongoing.

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

When they finish a task, even if the task takes five minutes, at the end of the month we can track all their work. They send us an Excel document where we can see exactly the time they spend and what they have done.

How did Quintagroup perform from a project management standpoint?

Their communication is very good. I communicate directly with the project manager. We have used Basecamp and Asana. We’ve spoken via Skype a lot before, and we now use Telegram for video conferencing.

What did you find most impressive about them?

In the beginning, when I would ask for something it would be a bit difficult. Now, when I request something, it is always possible, and they have no limits. I don’t think there is anything they can’t do. If you want something, they will do it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It has been a pleasure to work with them, and I think what we’ve developed is very good.

They could check for bugs a little more. If there isn’t time to check, there might end up being a bug. However, they’ll fix it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I think they have a team for everything and offer a full service. They can do full development and design. You don’t need to bring other people on for specific tasks, which makes the partnership easier.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are Ukrainian state-owned enterprise which perform electronic auctions for various government entities. My role is Head of IT department

For what projects/services did your company hire Quintagroup?

We've hired Quintagroup to develop central components of our main e-auction trading system

What were your goals for this project?

The goal was to deliver central component of two-level distributed system which should contain several business workflow modules and real-time auction modules

How did you select this vendor?

Quintagroup accepted challenge to deliver innovative solution in terms which are almost twice shorter than other competitors proposed

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They've provided full cycle of development including system analysis (we had only general business requirements), backend and frontend development, automated testing, deployment and project coordination. As a result during several stages we received three completely different real-time auction modules and 5+ business workflows integrated to each other

What was the team composition?

On different stages team size changed from 10 to 20 engineers of different specialities (development, QA, devops) and one project coordinator. From our side only product owners were involved

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Oh, well, e-auction system developed by Quintagroup is just the core solution which our enterprise is built around :)

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management is quite close, and some of the processes are hidden from customer which was slightly uncomfortable at some points of time. From another hand - Quintagroup took full responsibility for all agreed terms and never failed delivery, which means (for me) that this project management approach works fine

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The company was inspired by our project all the time. It was not just a job to complete for them—they actively thought about the project's future.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'd suggest to work a bit on sharing the information about progress and describing reasons of particular technical decisions