TechnoGroupOriginator

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the former president of a company that did automation for content creation. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with TechnoGroupOriginator?

Our company had a team of writers who produced content for us. It was an extremely manual process that went from topic research to article generation and then dozens of iterations. We decided to design a system that would automate that content creation process and brought on Haroon to help.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Haroon (Senior Technical Sales Consultant) was one of the more senior architects we had to help us engineer our content automation platform. It was a .NET-based solution. We ran the technology simultaneously across dozens of virtual machines, which meant that we also had to make sure that the generated results were synchronized.

What is the team composition? 

I worked with a project manager, but most of the heavy lifting fell on Haroon’s shoulders. He was more premium than anyone else on the team.

How did you come to work with TechnoGroupOriginator?

I found them through Elance-oDesk, which rebranded to Upwork.

How much have you invested with them?

We put in about $250,000 for the team.

What is the status of this engagement?

This project lasted from November 2011–December 2013. We ended up deploying a year later than intended, but that was because I had trouble relaying my vision to them. In the end, they pulled it off.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

In hindsight, they did a fantastic job of translating what I wanted into an actual, functioning product that was profitable. The only reason the project failed was that the business and market that we’d built the product for disintegrated with Google’s algorithm changes. 

How did TechnoGroupOriginator perform from a project management standpoint?

I spoke with their project manager once a day and then with the entire team every three days or so. As I said, it was a journey trying to relay my vision for the product due to the language barrier. They’d show me their work, and I’d try to give feedback on the designs until we got it right. At the time, we moved fast, trying out new ideas and deploying them every few days. It took a year for us to become profitable.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Haroon is a rock star!

Are there any areas they could improve?

There was a real communication barrier between me and their team. Whenever I tried to manage them myself or talk to Haroon directly, the barrier would just be too much to handle due to the culture and language difference. That’s why having a manager local to their team made a world of difference.

Granted, over the last few years, I believe Haroon has been trying to bridge the communication gap, and I suspect he’s come a long way in the last ten years.