Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Creative Manager for Texas A&M School of Innovation (I-School) and Innovation Partners.

For what projects/services did your company hire Inventive, and what were your goals?

We hired Inventive to redesign the current I-School website as well as create a separate, new website for Innovation Partners.

How did you select Inventive and what were the deciding factors?

We work for a state institution that has a list of preferred/pre-approved vendors or a pretty strict process for approving vendors we are allowed to use for various services. We selected Inventive Works because they were already in the Texas A&M system of approved vendors.

Additionally, they received a great recommendation from a colleague who had worked with them previously and we thought they did an excellent job on a recent website project that received extremely positive reviews in the A&M community.

During the vetting process, they exhibited advanced knowledge of the various software options available, presented the pros and cons of each, recommended what would work best for us/be the best fit for our project scope/budget, made recommendations based on our needs & not what was easiest for them.

They were easy to communicate with, creative, and a good fit with our team. Completion of the projects by our deadline was one of the biggest deciding factors. We had a pretty tight deadline and they were confident that they could deliver on time. To achieve that goal, they also did both projects simultaneously.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had a kickoff meeting to introduce the two teams (one for I-School and one for Innovation Partners), who was on each team, and what they did. We set up a process for communicating going forward and regular, weekly meetings. After the kick-off meeting, we dedicated some time to design and design concepts, moved into site map and wireframes, then selected templates for each page so they could be built out by the Inventive Dev & Design teams.

To get an understanding of the scope of this project, we had about 30 pages on the I-School site and about 65 pages on the Innovation Partners site. Once the pages were in production we started compiling and delivering content for them to add to the pages themselves.

Once the content was loaded to the page, we reviewed, provided feedback, reviewed the revision, and so on till the page was finally approved. After the sites launched we had a training session on how to make changes in Word Press.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had a team of about 15 staff members from Inventive working on both sites. We had one project manager for both projects and a variety of web designers, web developers, engineers, etc.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We have not run any analytics on the new sites yet and it might be too soon to see any significant changes or increase in traffic (the new sites have only been live for less than 2 weeks) but we will be running analytic reports and sharing the results with the Inventive team.

However, the feedback we have been getting both internally from our team who were not involved in the project/hadn't seen anything during the process and those outside our organization have been extremely positive. Absolutely everyone is thrilled with the new sites, exceeds expectations, and love not only how they look but the functionality as well.

One of the challenges with this project was to make the 2 sites look like they were siblings - you can tell they are related but they each have their own personality. I have heard from multiple people that we definitely achieved that goal. The Inventive team did a great job of helping us decide what that looks like and pull it off from ideas to reality.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We had weekly meetings for overall updates, review any mockups, answer any questions, and make any decisions that needed to be made immediately in order to keep us on track. If an urgent issue came up before the weekly meeting we would schedule separate meetings to address those as needed. We also emailed each other daily using standard language in the subject line to draw our attention to messages needing immediate attention ([ACTION NEEDED] or [INFO ONLY]).

In addition to email, we also used Slack to communicate and share docs, as well as Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs. Our project manager also sent dashboard reports summarizing meetings, the next steps, status updates, etc.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I was impressed with their responsiveness, dedication, and commitment to the project. The Inventive Works team was always available to us to answer any questions, have an impromptu meeting whether by phone or Zoom.

Since we were working on a very tight deadline, there were times where we needed an answer within the hour. I could and did pick up the phone a number of times and our project manager were always available. They were dedicated to the project and committed to getting it done on time even if that meant A LOT of 12 hour days, sleepless nights, and working weekends to make it happen. They also had the ability to develop creative solutions (especially on the data/data feed side) to issues as they arose.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Clearer communication is something that is a take away for both us as the client and the vendor. They were great at being available to us for a meeting, calls, etc. and scheduling consistent update meetings but early on there was some miscommunication on a design that caused us to spend more time on design and delays to the schedule.

We also weren't aware of the overall process and that when we were making decisions they were final/changing our minds later might cause delays.

Giving an overview of the process in "non-web developer" language (LOL!) during the kickoff meeting (including phases, what decisions need to be made by when in order to stay on track, when decisions are final and the impact of changing a decision later, etc.) would help the client know when they need to make a decision, when it's final, etc. Asking clarifying questions on both sides would also help with the process.

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