What was the scope of their involvement?
The software is used for internal task management. As an R&D company, we are fairly familiar with software design and development processes, but that's not what we do. I had a good concept of what I wanted in terms of the software requirements, and I had a few pages of written documentation. Basis this information, they provided their quotation, a rough number of hours, and their approach, which seemed reasonable. After verifying that, we started working on the project.
Their primary job was to develop a user experience design, follow that with the implementation given the software specifications that I've given, and develop the backend for it. I specified that I wanted it to be developed in Angular with the Mongo stack. They have a great deal of experience in some of the other third-party components that we needed in terms of messaging.
They laid out a plan, and we started to develop a proof of concept through storyboarding mockups. They took each of the requirements and conducted a detailed interview to make sure they understood how the system was going to work. They started to give me the UI design, which was very helpful for me to visualize how things would work. Every few days, they gave me pages to look at. They're fairly realistic mockups, and I critiqued them. They iterated and incorporated my design changes.
After that, implementation started. They published their code into our server, which we were able to look at and verify. They put up a staging server which I could interact with and see how things were going. That continued the iteration between UI design, HTML implementation, and backend integration until the project was recently finished. We are still in the process of fully integrating and testing.
What is the team composition?
There were three individuals involved. One was responsible for the frontend design, one was responsible for implementing the frontend, and one was responsible for Angular backend implementation. My main point of contact was the backend developer, and he relayed requests to the other two people who built the frontend. Occasionally, they interacted.
How did you come to work with SynapseCo?
I went to Upwork and posted a job listing, and they responded. The volume and quality of work they had done and the reviews they had gave me confidence that they had the technical competency to understand my requirements and do what we wanted. Rather than a one or two-person shop that I could not evaluate, they had a substantial body of experience. They seemed like a 300-person company. They had a well-defined process for gathering requirements, and they're very good at communicating. Every time they did something, they let me know. The interaction was on a daily basis and very thorough. That gave me the confidence that they're asking the right questions and that we'll get a product that's close to our specifications at the end of the day.
How much have you invested with them?
The cost turned out to be a little higher than I thought because I added a lot of requirements. We spent $14,000–$16,000 with them.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started at the end of July 2017. We've given them a different project, but this particular one ended in November 2017. Right now, we're internally integrating and deploying it.
The new system provides a task management system that is tailored to align with the unique business processes, keeping tasks on time but providing flexibility. Strong technical abilities and excellent graphic design contribute to a strong ROI, encouraging further collaboration.