On Target Group

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Xceleration is an employee recognition service provider, and we also provide sales award programs. Other companies hire us to put together, manage, and administrate these award or recognition programs for their employees. 

Employees use our proprietary enterprise platform, Reward Station, to participate. I'm the VP of technology development, and I manage the team that does all of the development for that platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with On Target Group?

We have a lot of projects that come and go, and our workload has flows that are pretty much like any other software development shop. We were looking for a partner that could provide a steady stream of diverse development resources over a long period of time. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We hired On Target as a partner that could provide a very cost-effective way of rolling new developers in and out of our organization, including React developers, .NET developers, DevOps engineers, and QA testers. 

This isn’t a project-based partnership; it’s an ongoing partnership. They’re an extension of our staff, and they provide QA testers, developers, and engineers. We also have a business analyst on our team from them.

What is the team composition?

We have two DevOps engineers and six developers. For testing, there's one person that's officially a QA tester, but the business analyst does a lot of testing, too. 

How did you come to work with On Target Group?

We discovered On Target through a business partner of ours. They had some good past experience with the On Target team, so we gave them a try. 

How much have you invested with them?

On average, we spend around $35,000 monthly. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the partnership in May 2019, and it’s ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve been very happy with them and the partnership. On Target is helping us meet our deliverables and deadlines. 

There are no hard and quantifiable statistics, but the quality of work is pretty good. We do code reviews on everything, and we've been pleased with their code quality. They're also hitting their deliverable dates. 

How did On Target Group perform from a project management standpoint?

From a project management standpoint, it's like they're a part of our team, and they attend all our stand-ups. We communicate mainly via Slack and Zoom. They're mostly overseas, so it’s a little bit difficult to communicate. 

However, On Target is good at communicating the time off that their developers have. We have a good team manager, who's one of our primary contact points over there. He's great at communicating with us about the planned time off for each of the team members that we have from On Target. That's very much appreciated. 

There are lots of cultural differences. Sometimes, cultural and communication differences are hard to overcome, but they do the best they can with what they have. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

On Target has been able to provide pretty much any skills that we've asked for in terms of the technology stack. They have a very diverse skillset and can provide pretty much anything we need, whether it's Python, C#, React, or SQL Server.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If there’s a way On Target could have a high level of consistency on their hardware, laptops, and internet connections, that would be helpful. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of their developers are working from their homes. It seems that some of them have better connectivity than others. 

We haven't had anything in that area that prevented us from working with anybody over there. It just seems that we have different levels of issues from one developer to another when we're trying to onboard them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Different countries take different holidays off. We communicate not only when Xceleration is off but also when their team is going to be off. Communicating with them about time-off plans and PTOs is crucial, because they take different vacations and holidays, and we do, too. 

Not only do they have different holidays; individuals on the team over there have their own family vacations just like us. Communicate about the time off with each other. That way, there's no surprise.