Smart Working

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Tiller Technologies Limited

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Tiller provides identity verification, onboarding and client portal products and solutions for regulated companies

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Smart Working to accomplish?

• Provide high quality IT staff
• Provide a cost efficient method for hiring offshore staff
• Professional ongoing management of provided IT staff

SOLUTION

How did you find Smart Working?

Online Search

Why did you select Smart Working over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Smart Working were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Providing IT development and testing staff to work on our web and backend software development projects

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I am very happy with the service provided by Smart Working. They are very customer focused and the quality of the candidates they put forward for positions are of a good quality and appear to be well screened. Having well motivated and skilled staff is critical to any business and I have been able to obtain such people through Smart Working.

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

They are proactive and efficient in their staff management. They also delivered to expectations on time

What was your primary form of communication with Smart Working?

Virtual Meeting

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

They are very customer focused and the quality of the candidates they put forward for positions were of a good quality and appear to be well screened

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

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Product Manager of vStream Media

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

ShineVR is an immersive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) platform delivering data driven, personalised experiences for Enterprise and Healthcare customers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Smart Working to accomplish?

• Understand and maintain existing codebase
• Incorporate best practices for codebase going forward

SOLUTION

How did you find Smart Working?

Online Search

Why did you select Smart Working over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget

How many teammates from Smart Working were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

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

• Take over install codebase 
• Add continuous integration and development process 
• Write unit and end-to-end test cases 
• Setup and use development, staging and production environments 
• Better use container technology

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Hard to say, the candidate did need a lot of training to meet our required levels of best practices, this was not unexpected and candidate did get there.

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

Yes, both Smartworking and developer are good time keepers and communicators

What was your primary form of communication with Smart Working?

Email or Messaging App

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

We're impressed with their good candidate pool and timely responses.

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

Better understanding of non-UK market - i.e. EU - in particular payment options in Euro and understanding of national holidays etc. For a while the candidate who is outside the EU was working for us in EU but observing UK holidays which didn't make any sense.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the lead developer at firm who provide branding services to both B to B & B to C customers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We used Smart Working to provide an additional developer to work closely with me to execute my vision for an internal system to stream line our order management and manufacturing processes.

SOLUTION

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

We selected Smart Working from a choice of 3 other vendors based on their approach and their rates. We interviewed the developer and after a 1 week trial we opted to go ahead with the project.

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

We opted to use Laravel for the basis of the platform as this is a platform we both had experience with. The platform is hosted externally but requires local access for various steps of the production process. The documentation was generated as the project has progressed as its a very bespoke platform specific to our needs it wasn't possible to document it ahead of time.

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

We worked directly with the developer on a daily basis.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project is on going and will be going into final testing in the coming weeks for the first phase.

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

We had daily updates in the morning and evening from the developer along with regular discussions throughout the day on the tasks at hand.

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

They are hardworking and dedicated to the task at hand. If he hasn't understood something he asks, if he doesn't feel something is taking the right approach he isn't afraid to voice his opinion to get us the best results.

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

As with any project communication is key and even with the best intentions elements can go awry with distance working and things being lost in translation.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-Founder, CIO & CTO of PDH

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

At Priority Digital Health we build digital solutions which support better self-management of people's health and wellbeing and reduce the chances of long-term health problems.

We care about driving improved system efficiency and cost savings for the NHS, public health and workplaces whilst keeping user experience at the forefront of our work.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Smart Working to accomplish?

• Reduce Development Costs
• Improve engineering skills
• Increasing engineering experience

SOLUTION

How did you find Smart Working?

Online Search

Why did you select Smart Working over others?

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

How many teammates from Smart Working were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

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

We needed additional reacouse for our in house team and wanted to develop a team of engineers based overseas 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

work delivered on time and to the standard we require

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

The team at Smart Working have delivered on every aspect we need from the start, delivering a great selection of candidates and the ongoing management is second to none.  

What was your primary form of communication with Smart Working?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

they are a breash of fresh air, they do what they promise and deliver what they say. 

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

no

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Pantera Technology

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We build forecasting software for the real-estate industry

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Smart Working to accomplish?

• To help grow our development team

SOLUTION

How did you find Smart Working?

Online Search

Why did you select Smart Working over others?

• Good value for cost
• They Sourced the best candidate for our position

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

SmartWorking provide us with staff augmentation for our development team - specifically frontend development. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are early into the process with our new team member, but Smartworking ran a great candidate sourcing process and were able to minimise the time we needed to spend interviewing. The candidates were of a high quality, which gave us confidence in moving forward into an ongoing agreement.

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

The process was managed through Slack, which worked well for us. Very responsive across the board with different requests from us.

What was your primary form of communication with Smart Working?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

They were the most proactive out of the companies we worked with, but ultimately it came down to sourcing the best candidate for our role.

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

No - I was happy with our interaction

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director of Workflow Doctor

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Document data automation - taking data from documents and integrating with line of business systems.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Smart Working to accomplish?

• Increase skilled resource availability
• Help to manage the recruitment process
• Easier access to skills in overseas locations

SOLUTION

How did you find Smart Working?

Contacted us

Why did you select Smart Working over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Smart Working were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

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

[Ritesh] came on board to extend our R&D team as well as work on bespoke customer projects. He worked with us as a regular member of our existing team. Key deliverables were the development of our own DevOps environment/pipelines, reverse engineering a legacy project for republishing to AWS and a series of samller bespoke projects (generally API + WebUI).

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Having quick access to an experienced individual with none of the associated recruitment hassle and payroll all taken care of.

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

Regular calls, decreasing in frequency over time as Ritesh became more tightly integrated.

What was your primary form of communication with Smart Working?

Virtual Meeting

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

We were impressed with their interpersonal relationship skills and our cultural alignment.

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

None spring to mind.