Simpat Tech

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Director of Operations for a management consulting company and professional services company focused on the public sector.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Simpat Tech?

We build solutions for the public sector, primarily K12 education, higher education, and some nonprofits. Generally, our clients will come to us with an issue, and we’ll create a solution for them. We’re working with Simpat Tech to augment our team with their software engineers and data engineers to help create and execute some of those solutions.

As an example, we’re working with some of our clients to take data from multiple sources - from places like their human resources records and their student attendance records - and to pull all of that data into a data warehouse so that our clients can generate actionable insights from it with dashboards and reporting.

We have technical leads within our group that will decide what approach to take to get through the backlog of tasks needed to get the work accomplished. They select the types of individual contributors, such as software engineers or data engineers, from our internal development staff or from Simpat Tech.

The Simpat resources have been great about coming on board and being productive very quickly to execute and move those tasks to completion, which helps keep us on track. .NET development is a big technical competency we rely on Simpat Tech for to augment our internal .NET development staff. We've also partnered with some data engineering skill sets, such as ETL and SSIS architecture and development, to understand how the data we’re accessing is pooled and where we can create some changes.

SOLUTION

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

We’ve worked with other solutions in the past, but what I enjoy about Simpat is the quality of the contractors that we work with. They come on board, and they’re productive very quickly. Simpat has been great about taking our feedback and helping us to find the right contractor who can continue long-term with us.

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

Our work is project-based, sometimes occurring in multiple phases. The resources from Simpat are allocated to one, maybe two, or sometimes even three projects here with our team, and they've done a great job about being flexible and onboarding to different projects in order to execute against our deliverables alongside our internal development staff.

When a client comes onboard with us, we work through some discovery in order to gain a further understanding of what their long-term goals are. Based on those long-term goals, we'll create a technical approach for the solution that we're proposing. Within that technical approach, our internal team members will think through what needs to be done to get things accomplished for our clients.

Once that’s done, very early on in a client’s project, that’s when we resource. We’ll assemble a team of .NET engineers, DevOps engineers, or data engineers for the project, get them ramped up on the project at a high level, and then start assigning tickets.

Simpat’s resources come onboard alongside our internal development staff, they attend our sprint planning meetings, and they start working on our backlog in terms of how many tickets they can take on within our sprints, which are generally two weeks. Then they’ll continue through that software development lifecycle until we complete it.

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

We currently have four Simpat contractors onboard, but we’re able to ramp up quickly as needed. As we are project-based, we don’t really know what our resource need is until we win a specific contract. But the resources from Simpat have done a great job about being flexible and onboarding to different projects in order to execute against our deliverables.

And when a project does wrap up, we always look to leverage them in a different project, because at that point they've proven themselves and are familiar with enough of what we're doing to be able to execute very well.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One current project we’re working on with a community college that’s looking to create a data request website where their different users - students, teachers, researchers, and community members - can come in and request specific data from different sources. We’re in the process of creating that website, and Simpat is helping us to design that and make the backend connections so that information can go to the right place.

Another is a state entity that we’re guiding through an EdFi implementation to bring their data into a single data warehouse where we can apply different reporting capabilities. We’re building the whole solution, and a team that includes Simpat’s resources are creating that backend solution within an AWS environment with the end goal that the client will own that data and be able to maintain their own environment.

Simpat’s efficiency has been huge in helping support these and other projects. Because our projects are so unique and bespoke, it can take a long time for new hires to come in and understand what we're doing. Because Simpat has some background already in our industry, their resources are able to come in, understand what we're trying to accomplish, and be efficient very quickly.

They’re taking and executing tickets within the first two weeks to 30 days, and we’ve been able to use their efficiency and knowledge to find more efficiencies internally for ourselves.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We embed Simpat’s contractors in our teams, so they’re in our messaging systems, they’re in our daily scrum stand-ups, and they’re there for team meetings. That workflow has been seamless. Once we identify that resource, it’s almost as if they become a full team member of our team.

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

What I find most impressive is the caliber of their resources and the expertise that they have, as well as the vetting process Simpat goes through before presenting us candidates. I've been able to rely on them to send us resources that are really skilled and that are going to execute well. That’s saved us a lot of time and created a lot of trust between us.

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

Nothing I can think of. We’re growing, and I know Simpat is as well. As we continue to grow, we’re looking for ways to grow together and to source more resources, especially in the really hot market for talent right now. We’re very appreciative that they can still find software and data engineer talent that we can continue growing in volume with.