Tech9

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the main contact, architect, developer, and all around IT for our company. Our company provides mental health help to first responders.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Tech9, and what were your goals?

Our current software was really outdated and suffering from failures, unreliable performance, and bursting at the seams causing significate slowdown and locking users out of the system as we added more clients. We needed to move the project from a single server to the cloud, rearchitect the backend for growth and completely update the front end from older synchronous interactions to more reactive, asynchronous actions.

Once we defined the processes, and architected the solution, we did our research, vetted quite a few companies, and then settled on Tech9. Our goal was to work with a company that understood the full development process, had defined processes in place, and understood our needs.

SOLUTION

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

After 3 months of vetting, demonstrations, and checking up on references, our team looked at the pro's and con's of each group, the costs and their processes. In the end, Tech9 was selected and has not disappointed.

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

We first met with Tech9 in a design session. Their design first approach allowed us to engage more of our staff, from end users to developers. It was important that we get the design done first to excite the users (many who are very non-technical) to see our vision. As we approved the look and feel, we quickly moved on to the backend architecture. We had already decided on the technology and cloud service, and iterated with Tech9 over our process, defining them and getting them laid out.

We also identified all of our partners we needed to integrate with, and laid out the system from end to end. We then started to scale back to the necessities to meet our release deadline. Ultimately we used Azure with .net Core 6 and a react front end. Our storage was Sql Server, and we used Azure Service Bus to serve as the communications platform for the microservices and azure functions.

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

We had a number of team members working with us. We had lead designers to kick off the project look and feel and flowcharting, we had systems architects to work with to break out the systems. We worked with front-end and back-end developers and a great team of testers. We also worked with a great project manager who kept things moving along and kept in contact with us.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The immediate result was a more responsive website that was able to grow during peak times. The interface was more intuitive which helped the users increase efficiency and spend less time fighting the software and more time helping clients.

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

We had weekly updates with the whole team, and communicated regularly on slack. All of my questions/concerns were quickly acknowledged and solutions presented were great.

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

They were very responsive, and helped us while we tried to define our look and feel. Most times, we deferred to their design expertise for our site and were constantly pleased. They were also quick to adapt as requirements were changed giving us good feedback on budget impacts and timelines.

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

No, they did great, especially considering some extraneous conditions that came up. Tech9 went above and beyond to continue supporting us.