Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the IT manager of a fabricator company for oil and gas products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Inventive?

We had various legacy applications that needed to be updated. I reached out to Inventive to help update a few applications but one in particular. Also, my technical team had experiences from all over IT. They started to do a lot of Powershell scripting that I had to get under control.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Inventive built a web-based translation layer using Azure. After one requirements gathering session, their team understood about 90% of the requirements. From there, our meetings revolved around tweaks. Following good devops practices, they committed to the test and then updated the test environments. Then, their team committed to master environments and the master environment’s updated. If I make changes to the code, it will deploy and update.

Their team reworked our system. They took an output from ADP, massaged, checked, and validated all of the information to upload into our accounting system. Their team also built the system to include contractors whose hours are tagged differently from company employees’. They also implemented changes that I didn’t consider. For example, their team attributed job numbers to the right jobs based on the history of our assignments and recently uploaded sessions.

They also trained my team on GIT. Their team gave us a whole class on how to use the system and best practices.

What is the team composition?

I worked with a total of four different people including a project manager.

How did you come to work with Inventive?

A contact referred us to Inventive.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $50,000–$100,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together on this project from July 2019–October 2019. I needed to stall the project because I was too busy.

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

While we had to iron kinks, the product that Inventive built worked. Their team was more than willing to get information and resolve the errors. The training session was wildly successful.

How did Inventive perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicated by email and a shared Trello board. All of the project’s information was available. They managed all of the version control and Azure devops. The cadence of communication was almost too fast because I wear a lot of hats.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their team was happy to train us. They were knowledgeable and had a lot of experience. Their propensity to train showed when I was able to talk with them. I wanted to learn and whenever I asked for an explanation, their team went into detail about their decisions and how they executed them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The project was beginning to go over budget. That was because I didn't set requirements. Inventive wasn’t alone there.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have the time to talk with them. Block off time to work on any project. It wasn’t their failure in communication that slowed our project. Their team poked and prodded for information but had to wait for my replies. Inventive can’t read minds.