Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Respondent 1: I am the COO of a social media network that leverages digital footprints from the past, merges them all into one place, and then offers opportunities to merge your friend’s take on life’s moments so you have the most comprehensive legacy possible. It is an app now but it will grow into a browser and desktop solution soon. We have been at this for a couple of years now and we have been using Surekha Tech for a year and a half.

What challenge were you trying to address with Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd?

Respondent 1: We wanted to hit milestones in a timely fashion. It was a learning curve being on both sides of the planet, and the biggest challenge was to get them to achieve the features that we wanted when we needed them.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Respondent 1: We started off with a $30,000 budget, and I think it probably got up to 10 times that. We needed to get the features as needed and we grew the team. We added a couple of full-time QA guys to help catch bugs that kept popping up. It felt like they were doing their best to get what we needed, but their best became very costly for us and time consuming, but we are still going to use them again because they are hard workers, they know the project, and they are willing to improve if we can figure out how.

We probably spent about $100,000 on a single feature that we trademarked. It is a map-like interface that allows people to access their memories quickly. We have dedicated part of their team just to focus on that one stream, and that was a third of our budget. That was a big challenge. We ended up having to acquire and shoehorn in open source code to help speed things up, but still, it turned out to be very difficult for them.

We are at the proof-of-concept stage now, and we are proving the concept to a point where we can inspire people that this is going to be more advanced one day. I think we still need to find a very dedicated data visualization UX team to do that. I think these guys at Surekha Tech are more generalists, and they can provide staffing as needed, which is a great advantage to working with them, but if you really need specialists, I think we need to continue deep searches on that. With a project like this, you can’t start off with specialists; you need guys like this to really power through to get to that specialist stage.

What is the team composition?

Respondent 1: I think we got up to about 13 people until we throttled back this month. We started off with 2-4 people, and then it just ramped up because we were trying to get features made that we needed. In their defense, we are feeling ourselves through this, and you don’t get clarity until you build it out a little bit. We provided as much detail as we could out of the gate, but we had to do adjustments as any software would. As things became more usable, they made discoveries. To get the features and make this more usable in a timely fashion, we thought that staffing up would help. They tried to cap off how much staffing we needed as well, but we are at a threshold between trying to push harder by reaching the maximum number of physical humans that can possibly work on this without stepping on each other’s toes and having those diminishing returns.

How did you come to work with Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd?

Respondent 1: It was a reference. Our technical lead shoreside has been working with them for years and is very pleased with their performance and I understand why. He wasn’t really available to project manage at the capacity he is used to with these guys, but he offered us an introduction and a little bit of oversight in the last couple of years.

How much have you invested in them?

Respondent 1: We have spent around $300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Respondent 1: I would say it was January 2019, and we stopped this month as we fundraise more. When we get more funds, we will pick back up again, probably at a smaller scale.

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

Respondent 1: On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a seven or an eight. We are pretty happy with the service for sure. It was good, and I think they did push the limits of their capacity based on what we are able to deliver, but their capacity wasn’t the crème de la crème. We actually had to pay, in the form of time and money, to make up for their lack of specialty with some parts of the app. The advice they have given along the way like needing some QA people and getting some people here and there was good, but I think we taxed them a little bit too much in regard to having specialists for what we needed.

Respondent 2: I think they have done what we needed them to. I think we have a clearer vision of what we are going to be able to do in the future as well. They are definitely good to work with and good people.

How did Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd perform from a project management standpoint?

Respondent 1: Working across the pond is like a two-way street. I did my best to manage the project, along with all the other things that a startup has to do, and then we had one of the technicians grow into a project management role. She did amazing but she was pulled in two different directions. Trying to manage a growing team while being the best coder is unheard of.

We actually brought in a project manager in the later months. It took some time to onboard him and he was getting better and better at it. The documentation was thorough, the service was there, the passion was there. They did bring in a great project manager who wasn’t a hardcore coder, but he was very busy keeping up with all the parts of the development and the people involved. He was a great liaison for me facing our company.

I think project management isn’t just a switch you turn on. When you hit the ground running, processes have to be implemented and adapted over time, and we were just about getting there before we cut back on the throttle. The capabilities are there, and they are willing to work with any system or service we want to project manage with whether it is project management software, techniques, or methods; they are very flexible with that and they learn quickly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Respondent 1: We tried a different development firm before we took on these guys.

Respondent 2: They really couldn’t do what we wanted to have them do. They didn’t have the capabilities, whereas these guys have been definitely able to bring the capabilities to do what we’ve needed to do.

Respondent 1: They are more resourceful, and they are able to pull in people better than we are able to achieve prior, and I think they do work hard for service.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Respondent 1: If anything, if there is a little more detail in logging and what was done in the particular hours that they put in. Because they are offshore and we are shoreside, getting a little more detail from each developer about what was worked on, when it was completed and how long it took for each given work item would be good because that allows us to steer the ship a little bit more. Knowing how long specific things take would allow us to make decisions on what to work on. They can maybe prioritize what gets rolled out in releases in a little bit more detail so it doesn’t feel like we are missing milestones and we’re not surprised that it’s not being done.

Also, a practice that we were just starting to implement before we throttled back, because of our burn rate, was time estimations based off man-hours instead of days as a whole. That was something we probably should have rectified a year ago. We were flying more by rubber band than by a stiff wire. Other than that, it seemed good. I just wish it was a little faster.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Respondent 1: Take the time if possible to really explain out the use cases, wireframes, flowcharts, and mock-ups in a great degree of detail and then deliver it to them asking how much it will take one human to do it in hours. Starting with that will save a lot of time and costs with them, although it is a ton of time and cost on our side preparing all of that stuff. I think it would make things go a lot smoother because it would help them predict the way out in the future, not just in two-week sprints.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the director of a consulting company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd?

We faced some product development challenges, and we wanted a development team that could help us with some projects.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We developed a widget on an open source platform. It was a complex project, and they helped us with all the tasks we asked them to manage. Technologies included JavaScript, jQuery, and a few other programming languages.

What is the team composition?

I worked with around three to four different people over the course of the project. The first task was handled by their CEO, and subsequent projects were handled by other developers. We don't use a dedicated project manager but work directly with the developers we engage.

How did you come to work with Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd?

We posted ads on Freelancer and other sites. We approached a few companies, and Surekha was one of the options we considered. We gave them a small task to complete, and we were happy with the outcomes from that first task.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend around $20,000-$25,000 per year on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them sometime in late 2015 and the collaboration is ongoing.

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

We don't track metrics as such, but our quality control team tests all their work. They give us good quality coding and software, and everything works wonderfully so far.

How did Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd perform from a project management standpoint?

We manage most of the projects on our side, while they oversee execution. They act as an extension of our development team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their developers on their team are sharp, the turnaround is fast, and they deliver quality products.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Offshoring always comes with challenges, mostly because of the time zone difference. If they could work to overlap with our developers, the outcomes might be better. We also run into some issues with differences in holidays or local days off.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure your requirements are concrete. It is easier to coordinate when you are clear from the beginning. If you manage your requirements and the time difference, the offshore model works very well.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO for a software company. We provide disease management software for hospitals and health systems.

What challenge were you trying to address with Surekha Technologies?

Initially, we were looking for some alterations to our stack. Since then, we’ve leveraged their team to develop several different aspects of our app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Originally, we hired them to perform some specific Liferay manipulation, as part of our stack. After reviewing some of our JavaScript backends, we hired one of their developers fulltime, to do backend coding and to build out the UI on Ember.js. Next, we hired another one of their developers for QA. Finally, when we added a mobile component to the app, we hired a part-time staffer from their team to build out an iOS-to-Android port.

What is the team composition?

I work with Gaurav (Founder & CTO, Surekha Technologies) and three developers.

How did you come to work with Surekha Technologies?

I came across Gaurav and his team on an e-lance platform.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve invested approximately $400,000 – $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in Fall 2012, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

We track Surekha Technologies' performance with what’s been estimated for our internal staff. Generally speaking, we tend to beat those estimates.

How did Surekha Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

We manage the project ourselves using Jira, Confluence, and Slack. Project management is always something we’ve had on our staff. Surekha delegates and coordinates their internal team, but we handle their efforts within our staff.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve worked with small freelancing companies and other outsourcing companies, and we’ve steered away from those solutions because the projects tended to go over our budget and over the timeline. With Surekha, we’ve had good experiences; their success led us to add more of them on staff.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be nice if we had an extra hour of overlapping worktime. The time difference is a big reason why I, personally, don’t typically work with them directly.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice would be to use them to augment your existing team and pass more responsibilities to them at a measured pace.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the co-founder of the company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd, and what were your goals?

Our website was created in 2016 and we were looking for a good, reliable web development company to re-design, optimize and develop our platform. Goals were to improve usability and functionality with optimum costs.

How did you select Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd and what were the deciding factors?

Referral, costs and company’s talent/skills. Also we went with Surekha because of strong recommendation for Gaurav.

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

• Redesign of the full platform  
• Integration with PayU (local India payment gateway)
• Improve usability and search traffic
• Manage the platform on day to day basis

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

Project manager (part time) 1 developer

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

Traffic has increased 125% and revenue from the platform has increased 300%

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

• Daily update on tasks completed from the backlog
• Proactive communication
• Fairly independent

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

They have strong delivery results and offer good value for their service.

Please describe your company and your position there.

textile company owner

For what projects/services did your company hire Surekha Technologies Pvt Ltd?

ERP System External production Product database

What were your goals for this project?

all on one platform

How did you select this vendor?

over the internet

Describe the project in detail.

Full ERP System dedicated to a textile production workflow (Including Product management CRM Internet shop

What was the team composition?

Flexibel 1 main consultant on surekha side plus depending on issues added consultant

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

On going process following the devt of our company

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

the workflow was great

What did you find most impressive about this company?

they are very close to us

Are there any areas for improvement?

Probably but so far very satisfied