SCIMUS

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of GForce Software

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We make software music instruments and sell them online (directly or through 3rd parties).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire SCIMUS to accomplish?

• Ensure we have a robust and reliable website/estore

SOLUTION

How did you find SCIMUS?

Referral

Why did you select SCIMUS over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from SCIMUS were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

They maintain our current website and develop the future one

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our website has massively improved since we started working with them. We had performance issues and this is a thing of the past.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Their management style is very professional. They onboard our feedback and never fail to adapt to our requests while providing professional advice and guidance.

What was your primary form of communication with SCIMUS?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

 We've been working with Scimus for almost two years now, and they've been a key partner in supporting our growth. Whenever we’ve encountered an issue, they've been quick to step in and provide reliable support.

They’re highly professional, extremely responsive when needed, and have played a major role in helping us plan and implement our future needs.

Before working with them, we had long-standing infrastructure issues with our website that previous partners had failed to resolve. Scimus took the time to dig deep, get to the root of the problems, and successfully fix them.

They’ve become a trusted and valued partner for us, and we highly recommend them.

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

None.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of product at BitTorrent Inc.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SCIMUS?

We struggled with hiring high-quality engineers, time and cost-wise, so we decided to go with an offshore agency and work with remote resources. We turned to SCIMUS to scale our software development teams.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SCIMUS is providing us with engineers who participate in our work cycle and help us with custom software development projects. 

Whenever we need to scale up our team, we give SCIMUS the skill requirements for a particular role. They’re like a staffing agency in that they screen candidates, forward the most fitting resumes, help arrange interviews, and even take care of some initial training. It’s a pretty standard recruitment process. Once a candidate is selected, they go on to handle the paperwork, payments, contracts, and legal issues.

Since the candidates are located abroad, not all of them are fluent in English. SCIMUS provides them with some language skill training and educates them on western work processes and culture. They also introduce the product or piece that we’re developing to the candidates.

What is the team composition?

We have two frontend engineers, two backend engineers, and a QA specialist from their side. 

How did you come to work with SCIMUS?

I found them on Upwork. They were one of the agencies that applied for a job that I posted. We began talking from there and started off with just one candidate. When I was satisfied with the quality of their resource, I decided to expand our relationship.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent a bit below $1 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around August–September 2019. Our relationship is ongoing and we’re considering expanding our number of remote workers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We don’t measure the individual performance of each developer, but we do measure the overall performance within our company. I talk to the team leads, and they’re happy with the team members that have come through SCIMUS. Their resources integrate easily with our own, and we feel that they’ll eventually become an essential part of our teams.

When it comes to working with the agency itself, I can say that the key success measurement would probably be the recruiting time. Where it would’ve taken us 5–6 months to hire a good engineer, it now only takes us two months at most with SCIMUS’s help. That's a huge success for us as a company. 

How did SCIMUS perform from a project management standpoint?

All product and project management happens on our side, and we’ve found that it’s simple and easy to work with SCIMUS’s remote engineers. They’ve perfectly met my expectations. 

We use JIRA, GitHub, and Slack for internal communication and Telegram and WhatsApp for external communication. Each one of their team members is fully integrated into our systems. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Communication and overall flexibility are SCIMUS’s best qualities, from my perspective. They’re able to understand exactly what we are looking for and translate that information into local job descriptions. They’re also able to strike a compromise between our expectations and what is most available in local or remote markets. 

The fact that the candidates they screen easily pass the initial resume review is very impressive as well. Usually, for an engineering position, we have to interview at least 10 people, and I can’t even speak about how many resumes we have to review just to get to that number. With SCIMUS, we usually get a couple of candidates and one of them is almost always perfect for the job. Their selection process is great. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t have any constructive feedback. I only hope that they prosper and continue to do the right things. Maybe they could add more locations and extend the number of languages they can speak to cover more talent markets. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They’re very easy to work with and are great at communicating and understanding clients’ needs. Working with them will be as simple as one could imagine.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a co-founder and projects manager in a small boutique consulting firm spread between Lithuania and the UK. We've run remote work (hiring, management) since 2003 for clients that leverage flexibility and on-call nature of remove talent / virtual teams.

In the last few years the world has caught up to the style of web development we did since forever - we're always online, always in a multitude of timezones, always remote. I serve a handful of accounts, most of them over 10 years and typically oversee new product launches / experimental features.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Initially, we worked on QA automation but further on our collaboration expanded and Scimus helped us build, test and launch a React.js-based UI framework (similar to Next.js) in a high load environment with a fairly minimal costs base and good results.

We went through hiring/getting a number of people involved for our projects as the market is fairly competitive and our goal was to work with professionals within Scimus as we would work with our colleagues anywhere, sharing values and work ethics along with the responsibility for results.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We are able to rely on our history and long experience in vendor selection with work culture being a decisive factor, an attitude towards uneven workload distribution with it's highs and lows, experience and desire to learn, curiosity towards new approaches.. Hard to boil it down to a formal selection process as we usually don't rely on one and choose with our guts.

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

A fair amount of work was focused around improvement and optimization of web applications performance ratings (Lighthouse/Google WebVitals etc.). In over five years together we went through a handful of long integration-type projects, upgrading legacy systems with far more modern, mobile-first web API driven web apps. Backwards compatibility and seamless data migration was always a challenge along with high amounts of live traffic and user support requests that we were handling. Legacy technology stack had to be balanced with modern web application development frameworks (Node.js/React.js/TypeScript).

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

At different times (with people coming and going) we have worked with over 15 people from Scimus crew in a range of positions, minority being managerial and a majority in client/server side web development, mobile development, quality assurance (manual and automated testing) and technical specification.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We've had a number of measurable outcomes (such as web app performance scores increase, new modules and projects launches) but value most our close touch working relationship with a team and the work culture that we were able to build and maintain. We are happy with our work so far and hope to continue to collaborate on new challenges in the future.

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

We were predominantly managing projects ourselves so the style was ours for the most part, with Scimus adding the capacity for an in-person meetings, their office culture and, in more recent times, safety towards employee health that we appreciate and value.

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

It's hard to strike a balance between being responsible and keeping the humane attitude inside the company / towards your own team - and towards clients and their projects. I've worked with a large number of clients, remote workers, contractors and seen most either on one end of the spectrum (too strict/instrumental, dehumanising) or on the other (chaotic, hard to rely on). I think Scimus maintains a remarkably healthy and balanced work culture.

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

In over five years of our work together I've seen ups and downs in many areas of our work and believe it's not mistakes but the ability to learn from mistakes are what matters. I see Scimus as a growing successful consulting business with a lot of potential and I think they are learning from their process quite well.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a company that provides marketing services to small businesses in the US. Our main product is a SaaS app, and we build a software solution that we white label to our customer base. The solution helps them market to their existing customers. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Scimus, LLC?

We hired Scimus for their custom software development services. They took over from our previous development partner. When that previous partnership ended, we also had the opportunity to rebuild the parts of our app that we didn’t like. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’re helping us develop our product. Scimus uses a whole host of technologies, including PHP and Python. They also use off-the-shelf components from different solutions; sometimes, the team uses pieces of open-source software that they then integrate into other solutions. 

With our end goal in mind, they work on our product in a highly automated fashion; the automation helps because many processes are highly repetitive. In other words, our teams have had to learn how to make our system more resilient. Moreover, we’ve built a whole layer of microservices to compartmentalize key features that have had problems in our initial build. 

In terms of features, our app provides transaction capabilities that allow customers to purchase things online. Scimus’ work focuses on the backend of the solution. While some elements of the frontend require designs, the solution doesn’t have to have to beautiful interface to work. Simply put, the value of Scimus’ work lies 80% on the backend and 20% on the frontend. 

Apart from development, they also do testing for us. They also work on our DevOps needs, such as hosting the platform. All of these are part of their job to deliver a scalable solution. 

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with a lot of people on this project. In total, we’ve interfaced with around 20–30 people. There are 2–3 project managers. 

How did you come to work with Scimus, LLC?

We found Scimus through internet research. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested close to $2 million. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June 2020, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

For comparison, it previously took us 60 man-hours to build one solution for a client. Now, we can build one solution within three hours — that’s a huge time-saving. Overall, we’re 100% satisfied with Scimus’ work.

Overall, Scimus has the ability to envision the development of our product. Other developers don’t think about innovation or scaling, so we’ve had to tell them everything. By contrast, our app has become more stable with Scimus. They continue to innovate it, so our solution has ultimately progressed well. 

How did Scimus, LLC perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve performed beyond expectations in terms of project management. The projects are challenging on a week-to-week basis, but I’ve been truly happy with them in the long haul. To communicate, we use Jira. We’ve had no problems with communication because everyone in their team is a good English speaker, and they’re always willing to work in our time zone. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The Scimus team is a quality partner; they care about the engagement and take ownership of the project. These qualities reflect in the relationship that we have. If there’s an emergency — even if it’s on a weekend — they’ll be there for us. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there aren’t any. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Investment into any relationship is fundamental to getting something back. Given that, you must invest in partners that are ready to amplify your investment. With Scimus, if you invest time and communication, they prove to be partners that can learn with you. They can proactively work with you as you run the company, and this provides you with significant benefits. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Partnership Development Manager at Lemon.io. We connect developers with qualified leads and help to resolve some issues as the project goes on.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SCIMUS?

We hired SCIMUS for QA services.

SOLUTION

How did you select this agency and what were the deciding factors?

We have a partnership with SCIMUS, and they were the best fit for this project, considering their expertise in QA and high-quality service.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

SCIMUS provided us with QA engineers who did automate testing and manual user acceptance testing.

The main tasks were:

• Designing test cases
• Communicating test results, defects, and possible risks to the development team
• Implementing automated tests for existing and new services and features
• Improving the overall process around the quality of the product.

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

We discussed candidates with the team's manager, and these candidates went through interviews with CTO.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our client was satisfied with the SCIMUS engagement.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

SCIMUS is fast and efficient. After many successful projects, I can say that the staff is very competent.

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

They are easy to communicate with, proactive, and follow all deadlines.

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

They need to hire more developers :)