. Situational Summary
The Business
For over 25 years, A Closer Look has earned an exceptional reputation in the area of customer experience measurement and analysis for their clients. They provide a wide variety of services including mystery shopping programs, market research services, and customer experience survey management, text survey and response platforms as well as internal audit solutions. Industries served include Restaurant, Hospitality, Health and Wellness, Retail, Senior Living, Professional Services and others.
The company was founded in 1994 and is located in John's Creek, GA, just north of Atlanta. They currently employ about 120 people. Business slowed considerably during the Covid shutdown. As stores and restaurants have come back on line, their business has rebounded considerably.
A Closer Look would like to engage an off/nearshore development partner(s) that can grow with them as they expand their business. Rather than spend lengthy amounts of time looking for partners on their own, they believe Accelerance can help them quickly find the right partner.
Offshore Experience
A Closer Look currently has a software development team located in Kenya through a vendor there, and a few engineers in the Philippines. They also have experience working with teams in India. The Kenya relationship is generally good, although it did run better before the team was reduced due to Covid.
As they grow, they realize they do not want all their eggs in one basket. They had talked about adding a second team before, one that offered better time zone alignment: they feel now is the right time to do so. If the new relationship is successful, they could wind down the team in Kenya, although that is not on the table now..
They have found a higher success rate with Agile teams who are encouraged to think independently, are offered a sense of ownership and accountability, and are capable of solving challenging technical problems without the need for constant direction.
Current State / IT Capability and Capacity
They are an Azure shop with vendor integrations with Quiq, Sendgrid, and Twilio. They have a legacy platform in C# and a more modern platform in React/Node, both with a SQL back-end. Their dev team in Kenya consists of five devs and two testers with a scrum master on the business side. They run two-week sprints with an extra week of regression testing and deploy software via CI/CD processes every two weeks. Their culture is collaborative and transparent, and they value honesty and accountability with an eye on quality releases.
Technology Stack
- Infrastructure: Azure, Virtual machines, Elastic Pool SQL Server, Blob / File storage, Jira ticket management
- Legacy: C#, ASP.NET WebForms, Telerik components, HTML/Javascript, Redis, ADO.NET w/ some Entity Framework, MSSQL
- Modern: Node.js, MSSQL, React, Express js
Working With A New Partner / Relationship Vision and Timing
They would like to diversify their development resources to provide redundancy and mitigate single points of failure. They would encourage cross-pollination of areas of expertise and a collaborative approach to knowledge transfer. Based on their roadmap, they would like to focus on refactor/technical debt items in the interest of scalability, implementation of large-scale initiatives such as data warehouse/data lake creation, complete migration from their legacy platform, and the implementation of a data analysis team. Implementation is targeted for 2023.
Desired Partner Characteristics
- Location: Open to any Partners able to provide the work day overlap described below.
- Time Zone: Must be able to work till at least 12:00pm ET. Ideally that would be 2:00-3:00 pm ET, with availability to respond to critical issues that may (seldom) happen after hours.
- Industry Experience: N/A. Qualities presented in the job description are most important.
- Other SME: Experience with Agile and Scrum processes are a plus, but not mandatory. May seek a Scrum Master role at some point.
- Certifications: Are there any desired or mandatory industry, technology, developer or consultant certifications?
- English Fluency: English fluency is important.
- Additional: Important to be able to respond to critical issues that may (seldom) happen after hours.
Onboarding and Ramp-Up
Onboarding would be with the assistance of their existing dev team in Kenya. Ideal team composition is one senior developer, two or three mid-level developers, and two QA/BA resources. They have provided a sample job description.
Budget and Funding
We have reviewed pricing found in Accelerance’s 2022 Rates and Trends Guide and the information presented for the various regions are inline with their expectations and budget.
Decision Making Process and Timing
The CEO and VP of Technology are the primary decision makers. Once a partner is identified they will seek a master service agreement, statement of work, and identified service level agreement. They are not in a major rush, as they are looking to stand up the program in Nov 2022, for launch in Jan 2023.
Our Recommendations
Accelerance has considered your objectives and partner selection criteria in the context of all members in the Accelerance Global Partner Network. Given your declared needs and objectives, Accelerance is delighted to introduce the below Certified Partners as our top aligned choices to work as a dedicated Partner.
These accomplished groups are excellent representatives of the 60+ Members of our Global Service Provider Network.
View the Partner Matrix
