Touchline Marketing

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are a large state university system with dozens of schools.

What is your role and responsibilities?

My title is lead campus data architect. I perform a variety of tasks, but it's primarily in the enterprise and data warehouse area. I may architect warehouses, or I may do marketing. I may do fundraising or detailed work.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with KPI Partners?

Our goal was to deliver a number of projects. One was student financials and another was in the student curriculum area. I also upscaled our entire approach.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

KPI Partners did a lot of the actual work. We have onshore and offshore developers that completed the bulk of the work, the actual programming and development work. Berkeley did most of the business analysis, project management, and user interface. KPI Partners primarily did the development piece.

What was your process for selecting KPI Partners with which to work?

I did some research on a variety of companies. KPI Partners came up toward the top. I brought in four companies and a group of us interviewed them. From that, we decided to bring KPI on for the project.

There is ongoing work, but the student financials project is essentially done. The student curriculum has had several implementations. The last implementation is scheduled for October of 2014. We will continue forward with more projects, and we expect to continue to utilize them.

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

The budget range is above $500,000.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

I don’t have specific metrics. Oracle gave KPI their Excellence Award for the curriculum project. I believe that KPI and Berkeley are the first university or government entity that has won that award. I give a lot of credit to KPI for the quality of the work.

How is their general performance?

I felt that the projects went well and that they provided good developers in most cases. We had a couple of occasions where we haven’t had particularly good developers, and we swapped them out for better ones. All in all, I feel good about the way they have treated us and the quality of people that they have brought to our projects.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

They have both an onshore and offshore presence. For us, that was key because there were some situations where we needed to have people face to face, and there were other times when we wanted to take advantage of the lower cost model in having offshore.

KPI Partners managed their offshore resources, which is what they’re accustomed to. We found that [verbal] communication between all of us at Berkeley and the offshore team was important in order to shortcut the whole development process. This was an improvement over having three or four intermediate people who were trying to convey a message. We used an agile development style, and we all got on the phone and talked about what was needed. That worked very well.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

No.