Sedente

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a third-party verification company for control equipment in the oil and gas industry. I’m the technical compliance supervisor. In that role, I manage our survey and verification process as well as the team that performs hands-on work to conduct verifications and surveys.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sedente?

We wanted to take our survey process, modernize it, and put it into a web-based format so our staff no longer needs to use conventional methods to handle reporting. Ideally, this would be more collaborative than the Microsft Exel and Word documents we currently send back and forth.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They created a web app using Angular to make our reporting more readily available to both internal and external stakeholders. Creating a web portal, the team helped us enable our staff and clients to access information relevant to them. We can manage user privileges based on how different users will employ the software. Currently, we can only offer weekly updates to customers, managers, and surveyors via Excel and Word documents.    

What is the team composition?

In total, we worked with 5–7 people. Primarily, I worked with a project manager and a software developer. I know they have a team of developers working in Poland that helped with our project.

How did you come to work with Sedente?

We found them online while looking for local software companies, meeting with 5–6 of them right off the bat. Sedente seemed able to provide examples of their work more quickly than the others, and we noticed that they worked on a very similar web portal project in the past. Based on that, we decided to hire them.  

How much have you invested with them?

To date, we’ve spent about $65,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2019, and the project is still ongoing. The development is split into three phases, and we’re just entering the third.

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

It took about a month to develop an MVP. From there, we’ve been testing their work and holding weekly calls with the project manager to make sure everything is running smoothly. I would list any bugs or issues we were having, and they would send back corrections. That’s been our ongoing troubleshooting process, which has worked very well.   

How did Sedente perform from a project management standpoint?

I’ve dealt mainly with our project manager, who seems to have a very good grasp of the technical side of the development as well as management. Whether it’s a technical or functionality question, he’s able to take what I’ve envisioned and pass it onto his team. They put it into action from there.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m not a programmer, but they’ve been able to work with me to achieve an optimized product. As the development began, their team was great at adapting to the changes we requested. They offer their own suggestions to make different project components better, prioritizing our needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We probably could’ve spent more time laying out requirements on our end. That would’ve helped us move things along more quickly. Once we got things rolling, we found ways to do things better than originally planned. Because of their adaptability, I can’t think of anything they could improve upon. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Spend more time ironing out your requirements and desires upfront.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a project technical manager and IT administrator for PEMSoft Solutions, an oil and gas company in Houston. We’re primarily focused on software development.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sedente?

We’re an old company with 25 years of experience and some very important legacy code. It defines our company character, and we wanted to make sure that code is kept in place and updated. We looked to Sedente to provide dedicated development resources.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Understanding legacy code was primary directive number one. There’s a learning curve with this kind of stuff, but we thought it would take longer than it did. We were very pleased with the outcomes. While understanding it, the developers we hired from Sedente told us how to improve it as well. In fact, they created an analysis tool for our software to understood and troubleshoot error codes. They still use it, so there’s no going through million lines of code to find an issue. Our senior in-house developer was very impressed. Recently, we had some projects slow down on us so we went down from two to one developer, with the second on standby.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with three diff people. First, we were introduced to Sedente by Tom (Application Development Architect, Sedente). He’d worked for us previously on a year-long project and kept in touch over LinkedIn. Development wise, we’ve worked with Paul and Crispian. Paul came on first, but we’ve put him on standby based on our project workload. Crispian came on six months later and is still a critical part of our business.

How did you come to work with Sedente?

Because our software deals with scientific calculations, we needed developers comfortable with complex mathematics and logic. Specifically, we needed Fortran understanding, which a lot of senior developers have but younger developers don’t. We also wanted our resources to have technical education or experience and a background in mechanics. There’s a lot of that in oil wells.  

Tom kept in touch with us and started working with Sedente. He happened to reach out to me when we were thinking about moving our installation software to the web, and we talked about some possibilities. He came up with a project timeline and a month-by-month process. We were confident this was the right choice.  

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since early 2018.  

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

Our clients are our number one goal. We operate with the user in mind, not the developer, so when we see a bug, we stop in the middle of a technical process to fix it. The Sedente developers may have worked on a process like it before or not, or it could be the same executable or a different one. Regardless, they turn around and fix it without any issues.  

We’ve also entered new security for our software (activation and downloads) and one-click installations and source safes/code repositories. We trust that they know exactly what they need to work efficiently, and it shows.  

How did Sedente perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve over-exceeded our expectations. In the development world, you’re never done building the code. It grows faster than the developers can perform, but Sedente has managed it well. Sometimes, they even work over the hours expected. We value that and tell them so. In fact, the reason we pulled Paul’s time back is that we advanced past his projects. And Sedente was fine with keeping him on standby.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re a critical asset to our company. Every time with think we’re giving them something a little too complex, they get it. Crispian’s, who’s still with us, has been learning quite a bit about petroleum engineering through his work with us.

They’ve been aces for us in that they care that we get what we’re paying for. They call us quite often to make sure we don’t need any additional assistance.

Are there any areas they could improve?

As one of the project technical managers, I don’t’ see how they’re being billed for hours they’re working on the weekend. I don’t know of an online portal for the info. I don’t think we need it, but I recently wondered if there was one that I didn’t know existed.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make your requirements as technical as you want before you hire someone. It worked great for us, really narrowing down the search.