Case Studies

The Challenge

This client is a market leader in the survey, research and brand advertising marketplace. Their biggest issue was their high reliance on their internal IT teams to deliver technology tools and applications tools to allow them to service their client contracts. They were keen to exploit new technology as they are a worldwide enterprise and many of their clients are worldwide entities. Most of the tools and applications they required needed total flexibility and needed to be used by thousands of research assistants positioned in many countries around the world. At the time they engaged us they were bidding for a huge postal services project including the Royal Mail and other large postal services in Europe. This project required an application to allow researchers from many different countries to log tracking and performance information on postal services. The application had to cater for multiple time zones, multiple types of inputs and be able to collate all information to produce detailed MIS.

They client’s biggest issue was continually suffering from poor IT delivery in terms of quality and lead time and often found that their business teams were frustrated with not being able to chase more business as the bottle neck lay with internal IT delivery. Furthermore they found that the skills requirements demanded highly paid UK contractors - a price they weren’t willing to pay or sustain long term, least of all being able to find skilled FTE’s who would provide continuous employment. In order to qualify and win the postal services project they needed to be confident they could develop tools and technologies quick enough to service the contract. In fact prototypes needed to be built and developed to prove the concept.

The Solution

We were asked to engage the project on a time and materials basis providing a small team of 4 developers to work alongside and collaborate with a large Indian outsource company who were delivering the majority of the application. The client was offered an attractive fixed daily price for our resources which allowed them to reduce risks and budget effectively; they were also very impressed with the 95% delivery capability of the team. We delivered small but key bits of work and interfaces to agreed timelines on a regular basis. Soon it was evident to the client the work was not only delivered on time but was much higher quality than the Indian outsource company. Using our resources for the majority of the early deliverables the client won the bid for the postal services project including the Royal Mail. We were asked to adopt all of the work of the Indian outsource company and sanitise their code to allow easier support moving forward. We were also given the entire project to deliver as part of this exercise and we continued to deliver all project requirements per agreed timelines and cost with a tightly controlled and budget conscious program. The model agreed allowed the client to move all its IT production i.e. coding and pre-testing offshore retaining all business and domain knowledge onshore.

All design was also handled by their onshore BA’s working closely with our UK account manager and offshore project manager. We also positioned some of our offshore resources onshore as support personnel on fixed daily rates. This model was run for 4 years providing the client with massive IT savings and on time deliverables.

IT Outsource – Global Research Company