Symphony Solutions

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder and director of FlowerCompanies, a global online search engine for the floriculture industry. It contains structured and organized information about 100.000 floricultural companies, such as growers, importers, exporters, logistics, packaging and other industry-related services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Symphony Solutions?

My company hired Symphony Solutions for product design and custom software development of a fully responsive online floricultural directory that contains a massive scope of information, features and modern plain design. To bring up visibility of the platform in Google Symphony Solutions provided wide range of digital marketing services. Symphony has been maintaining and upgrading the product upon demand.

What were your goals for this project?

The main goal was to create a product that will fully serve the needs of the users delivering great experience design across the platforms Another challenge that was successfully resolved was the admin panel which needed to be simple, intuitive, but without information loss for the end-user. The admin panel was divided into main tabs in order to deal easily with a massive scope of information. The tab amount depends on user payment plans.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Another company recommended Symphony Solutions, after some contact moments we decided to continue. We have a some great experiences with Symphony Solutions and are very satisfied with their serivces and knowledge.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The idea behind the project was to create an online yellow pages for the floricultural industry. The basic concept was simple but troubleshooting, as it required considerable effort to find contacts of companies from new floricultural markets out of their limited digital presence. Symphony Solutions' marketing team conducted initial market research which made significant updates to the overall idea. From then on, started the story of FlowerCompanies as a global floricultural online directory.

The website offers the companies the possibility to put information for their businesses, add their own websites and complete their company's profile. It also provides a possibility for the companies to add advertisements, to make recommendations and rankings, and to increase their visibility by paying for premium membership.

What was the team composition?

The team was consisted of a service delivery manager, graphic and experience designers, digital marketing specialists, 2 full-stack developers and a QA engineer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The product fully meets search engine requirements, which make it easily reached by the target audience, which is very important for this type of business. Even though it was built in Angular JS, which at that time was quite challenging SEO-wise, nevertheless Symphony Solutions managed to index it properly in order to become ranked on the search engines.

They were very effective and synchronized as a team, since they've gathered and understood well our requirements for what needed to be done, they've made a market research and updated our concept, created a modern and intuitive design and built the website in the agreed deadline for delivery.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The project management was excellent, as they well understood my idea, took their time to analyze it and provide me with their proposal on how to offer the best possible solutions for my potential users. They've communicated effectively and let me being in the know on how they're progressing, which the potential impediments are and what are they going to do in order to overcome them. They've managed to meet the required delivery deadline.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The most impressive thing about Symphony Solutions, is that while working with this company I've got the impression that they consider this project as their own, and that they're working not just to respond to my requirements, but to build a successful product that will solve the users' needs.

Are there any areas for improvement?

As a director and a company owner, I'm very satisfied with the proficiency level that Symphony Solutions performed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CEO of Blexr, a performance marketing company that provides online lead generation services to forex companies and iGaming operators.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Symphony Solutions?

We hired Symphony Solutions to coach and mentor our cross-functional teams, senior management, and all business units in what it means to adopt a lean-agile mindset.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to support the growth of the business by moving from a traditional waterfall development process to a lean-agile mindset. Last year, our company grew from 25 to 100 people, so we wanted to remove the silos in the organization. We wanted to create an open culture that supports honest analysis and a learning environment.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I selected Symphony Solutions based on my previous working experience with them. Malta’s talent pool is limited, and finding staff is a constant challenge.

Describe the project in detail.

Symphony Solutions first assessed our current setup. Afterward, they conducted a product increment planning session for implementing the agile process. They supported our teams during sprints, guided us through retrospectives, and covered gaps in engineering talent.

What was the team composition?

Initially, we worked with a certified SAFe® trainer who coached and mentored our internal agile coaches. We added frontend and full-stack developers as well as QAs.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our agile transformation is well underway, although it is a constant journey with continual improvement and tweaks. We release more often, so we have far fewer “big bang” releases. Not only have we removed all silos, but we’ve also seen improvements in organizational learning and morale. Plus, our time to market has certainly improved a great deal.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was excellent.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was impressed with their transparency. Their desire to go the extra mile is a rare quality in third-party relationships. It’s superb that Symphony Solutions’ team and our staff subscribe to the same view.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There is always room for improvement.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Virtualstock is a digital supply chain and marketplace platform. We work in the retail and the healthcare sector, primarily in the U.K. but we currently have some clients in Europe. We help them join up their supply chains so that they can operate more efficiently and have a wider range of products available. I’m the chairman and CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Symphony Solutions?

We were looking into options for resource augmentation for our development team. Our platform is written in Python and those skills are quite difficult to find in the U.K. We wanted to find a new pool of talent that could supplement our development team.

Our product, the Edge, is an Agile data connector. It’s a data translation platform for suppliers: they load products and inventory into our system and it’s translated into a format that retailer’s systems require, in real time. The platform is built in Python, Bootstrap, Django, and the base platform is PostgreSQL.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They support our journey through the implementation of Agile methodologies. They’re skilled in Agile and have worked with a number of companies to help them implement Agile approaches and integrate an end-to-end Agile methodology. They’ve been insightful and of value to us in helping us structure and execute that project. Without them, we wouldn’t have made near the progress we have with Agile.

We split into 4 scrum teams that work on different areas of the Edge product. They have people working in each and every scrum, so they’re an integral part of our core development team now. They cover development, testing, and service desk. They are the majority of our QA [quality assurance] testing resource and do almost all of our QA testing, about a third of our development resource, and all level one support on the service desk.

What is the team dynamic? 

We started with one developer and a couple of testing people. Now, there are 25 people from Symphony working on our projects. The total development team is about 50, so they are about half our team. They’ve become part of our team. We have a project manager and he’s the person that we go to for any resourcing requirements and coordination requirements.

How did you come to work with Symphony Solutions?

They were working with another colleague and friend of mine who recommended them to me. The principal is also a long-time colleague and friend that I trust.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $200,000 and $1,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in September 2015 and have an ongoing engagement.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The biggest measure is that we’ve carried on expanding the team. Our head of development thinks they are delivering high-quality people who integrate well into our team and become productive very quickly.

How did Symphony Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re first class. I would never grow from 2 people to 25 people if they hadn’t been delivering great service, high-quality, and great value. We work remotely. Most of the team lives in Macedonia or Ukraine, but logically they are very integrated within our development team. We have Symphony represented in each and every one of our development teams.

We haven’t any issues with communication. They’re used to working in an environment where their team is remote from the customers that they work with. They all collaborate very well. They’re all using the same common tool sets. We have daily calls and they use Slack channels. In some ways, the project has helped us develop a model of working which is less dependent on a physical presence and is more productive.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their resource around customer care and customer satisfaction is the best. They would do almost anything to ensure that they deliver high-quality output that more than satisfies and more than meets our expectations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I’ve been happy with them and everything they’ve done.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Listen to Symphony when you start working with them because they’re very experienced in working both in an Agile development environment and a highly distributed environment. It’s easy sometimes to dismiss external advice when it could be helpful in making sure that the new working methods and approaches are as productive as they can be. They have a lot of experience in making these sorts of projects really successful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of sportsbook architecture at a U.K. and Ireland based sportsbook gambling company. We deal with horse racing, football, betting, online casino games, etc., and have about 3,000 retail shops in the U.K. and Ireland. We’re a FTSE 250 company in the U.K., so we’re also in the stock market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Symphony?

We were mainly a vendor-driven organization, but we weren’t getting the service we required in terms of support and product requirements from some of those vendors. The overall architecture was unstable, so we we wanted to own the IP and drive our own future. We looked at doing it onshore with our business, but at the time, we didn’t have the wider in-house skills. We decided to look offshore.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We range from doing software development, QA automation, and backend development. We’re doing a lot of native web developments with Java, and there are a lot of integrations with providers as well. We cover the whole stack and lifestyle.

They do frontend web development, mainly single-page applications. They build native applications for iOS and Android, and the platform allows user registration, login, account history, and placing bets. There are a lot of microservices around KYC [know your customer], and they’ve also developed a lot of microservices data aggregation.

We built a single page application for our website. From there, we built a CMS system using NodeJS, Java, and Mongo, which defines the specifications of the app on the fly. We’ve been working with them on the CMS for our apps and how we can roll that out to the wider business. We’ve been advising on this as they expand their business into customer managements and account managements.

They’re integrating with a number of sports feed providers for live video streaming. They’ve also integrated with Playtech and OpenBet, and have interacted with a lot of other development companies within our company’s project sphere as well.

They also do a lot regarding WebSocket technologies. We’re on the Amazon cloud, so it’s an AWS [Amazon Web Services] based solution. They do a lot of performance testing for us, as well as job site performance. Since we work in a regulated industry, they also do a lot around compliances with us to ensure and validate that the software agrees with industry standards.

What is the team dynamic?

We participate in their recruitment process and initial screenings of candidates, so there’s full transparency. It’s a very collaborative rather than a client-supplier approach.

We have 11 Agile development teams totaling 85–90 people with Symphony who are responsible for building features. They’re all very self-sufficient. Each team is comprised of a scrum master, QA, automated QA, front and backend full-stack engineers, dev ops, native engineers, and automation engineers. We also have about 20 people total involved with QA.

In the last 2 ½–3 years, we’ve built our whole product engineering team with Symphony, so we are a large part of their customer base. They’re actively part of our Scrum or standups. Our product engineers and engineers work closely together on the product. I don’t just hand them requirements and expect them to deliver. We work with them on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis. They’re a very integral part of what we do.

How did you come to work with Symphony?

We looked at development companies in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Poland. We did a review based upon our ability to recruit the relevant resources and scale to the level we wanted to be at. Within a year, we wanted to have 80–90 resources working within the organization, as well as a close collaborative process between engineering and product. Many companies we went to see were only going to write code, but we needed a team that would be an active part of what we deliver, have ownership, and have a buy-in to our product.

One of my colleagues had previously worked with Symphony for 3–4 years. I met Symphony in 2014 when I was head of software development and architecture prior to our merge. We liked how they approached the business and their ability to actually influence the way the processes were driven. We liked their attitude, recruitment policy, and availability of resources. Their rates were comparable with the rest of eastern Europe, but when it came down to their recruitment process, their quality of engineers compared to other companies was much more attractive.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2015, and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One year after we started working with Symphony, we had to be off our existing platform. They delivered an entire sportsbook app with 35 people at that point. We were able to save the company, and also saved a lot of money in engineering costs and revenue share. In our first year, we reduced our yearly costs by working with them. Our Twitter reviews are far superior than what we had 2 ½ years ago with our previous product.

Their quality of work is excellent. We have better engagement within our business because of the quality of product they’re delivering. They have a good understanding of our business and requirements, and their engineers also have excellent communication skills.

How did Symphony perform from a project management standpoint?

We drove our Agile approach within the Symphony arena. We also introduced SAFe [Scaled Agile Framework], and with their help, we’ve taken that into our teams which allows them to conduct training. It’s nice to see them take what we’ve brought into them and extend is as part of their business proposition.

They’ve come to London for planning sessions, and my product colleagues and I spend a large part of our time in Ukraine with the team as well.

They’re very responsive and have excellent communication skills. We get a turnaround time of 20 minutes regarding support. They’re meeting their SLAs [service level agreements] 97% of the time. Their engineers work in U.K. time and are always available to us, even outside of work hours. They run our 24/7 support desk, so we operate 365 days per year with them. We have real-time monitoring via New Relic, which they implemented.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re highly competent. They have passion around engineering and their management team. They’ve delivered work for us under extremely difficult circumstances. To actually build a sportsbook within a year, when they knew nothing about it, was phenomenal. Anyone in the industry would say that’s impossible to achieve with an outsourced company.

The quality of work and passion of the owners, senior management team, and engineers for delivering a quality product is impressive. I’ve worked with a lot of engineering teams, and even built one in-house, but Symphony consists of some really amazing people.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could strengthen their management team, but there are only a couple minor-level points. Their ability to support our business after hours and on weekends during busy times is phenomenal. If they replicate that with their other clients’ projects, they would see it as very beneficial and successful.