welance

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a team lead at a nonprofit organization that offers education programs to teach children about food and nature. Additionally, I’m a product owner for our website and education platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with welance?

We had two big projects; the first was a rebranding that required a relaunch of our website. Although we have design and development teams, we had to get outside help because of the tight schedule, so we asked welance to help us code the site. The second project was building an education platform for teachers and educators.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

welance rebuilt our website from scratch using Strapi as a headless CMS. First, we explained what we wanted to do ourselves and what we needed help with. We designed the site, and they proposed how to realize our design. Together with welance, we decided on the site structure, templates, and components needed. The team coded most of the website, and we did code reviews and API work internally.

After that, they helped build our educational platform, a log-in space for our teachers, educators, and volunteers — 9,000 in total. We already had an education platform in TYPO3, and welance rebuilt some of its features with our new brand design and more functionality. They developed the platform using Strapi, the same CMS as our website, which is what we requested. 

The team also built functionality so that the platform gets data from different services we've built ourselves. They integrated different APIs and information sources, so the platform receives user information and some of the content from different platforms. For example, they integrated MailChimp. We also requested that the platform be scalable; we needed it to become the basis for future development so we could build more features. Other technologies they used include Next.js and Vue.js.

What is the team composition?

We worked with five people from welance. The team included four developers and a technical product owner who organized and reviewed the work, though he also helped with programming. 

How did you come to work with welance?

We had friends who had worked with and recommended welance. First, we talked to the German side of welance, and then we were referred to the team working in Italy. We had some workshops together where we tried to grasp the project's expectations, deadlines, and needs. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about  €240,000 (approximately $246,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from May 2021–February 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our biggest success metric is that the education platform went live on time. Although the website had a two-week delay according to what our management wanted, welance had already advised that the launch date wouldn’t be doable. Overall, welance was on point and ready to launch on time. Additionally, they were very helpful when we needed to make decisions made. We appreciated their suggestions and their help in choosing which technologies, platforms, and products to use in a very short time. 

How did welance perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a weekly review and planning sessions with welance developers to align about the following sprint and what was done previously, following the Agile methodology. In between meetings, we were connected via Microsoft Teams. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

From the first day, welance focused on the deadline and ensuring they hit it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could have done a better job with clean code. Additionally, they should have discussed with us when creating concepts. We have our own developers who wanted to have a say in the concepts. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make everything transparent and have all the information welance needs at hand so they can work fast. You should also have conversations with the team.