Website Development & Design for Financial Firm

Praxent delivers development support to a financial firm. They’ve helped rearchitect their client and public sites with Linux, .NET, and React. The team provides frontend, backend, and DevOps resources.

Background

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the Project Manager for a private investment management company.

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Opportunity / Challenge

What challenge were you trying to address with Praxent?

My company undertook a project to develop a new digital client site. Our legacy site had not been refreshed in more than 10 years. The decision was made to develop a new platform to not only achieve our MVP goals but that would allow us to evolve in order to meet our client needs over time. This was the largest project our firm had ever taken on.

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Solution

What was the scope of their involvement?

Praxent provided a solutions architect to help us architect and design what our new site would look like from a technical perspective. They also provided development resources from both Linux and .NET backgrounds. Praxent’s team developed the frontend with React. They provided DevOps resources that helped us design a framework, choose a deployment strategy, and get that in place for both our client and public sites.

We’d done quite a bit of the site design with another company, so Praxent came in on the technology side and helped us design what the backend would look like from architecture and development perspectives. In the past, we hadn’t shown our models or allowed our clients to be able to build models on their own, and Praxent helped us bring that functionality onto the site.

What is the team composition?

At our peak, we had six Praxent team members on staff, and I was their project manager. We worked closely with both Chris (Director of Operations) and Kevin (Managing Partner). 

How did you come to work with Praxent?

They had helped us in the past with a much smaller initiative, and we’d had a really good experience working directly with Kevin. For this project, we looked at a couple of companies, and we felt like Praxent would be a good fit for what we needed. We had to identify several resources through our interview process, which included developer testing. Praxent was able to quickly find matches for us, even when we needed to ramp up on certain parts of the project on short notice.

How much have you invested with them?

I can’t disclose that at this point, but they’ve definitely been able to work with us and find the best fit for our budget and the goals of our project.

What is the status of this engagement?

For this project, my company began working with Praxent around the end of 2016. In total, we’ve probably been working with them for about four years.

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Results & Feedback

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

One of the things that anyone is tracking when they launch a website is how many issues there are and how many clients are having problems accessing the site. We were completely staffed for two weeks around the time of the launch, and we had zero major issues. Since Praxent had a significant impact on the site’s development, I think they were also a big part of us not having any major issues during launch.

Ongoing, we’re gathering and continue to gather analytics from our old site as we completely retire it, and then analytics from usage on our new site. What we’re seeing is exactly what we were hoping for: better adoption rates, so we’ve been able to drive people back to our site more times per month for longer periods each time. Again, without Praxent’s help on the development side and then their questions and feedback along the way from the management side of the house, we may not have gotten to where we are today. Also, adding the modeling functionality to the site was a huge win for us.

How did Praxent perform from a project management standpoint?

Because it was such a large project for us, we kept in touch with both Chris and Kevin. When I dealt directly with them, they were extremely responsive. This was a very large effort for us, so Kevin and I met on a bi-monthly basis to touch base on milestones, issues, and anything that was high-risk. Whenever we had questions on invoicing, Chris was always quick to respond. From that perspective, they were at the top of their game. 

There were many contracts that needed to be extended due to how our HR and legal teams do things, so being able to be in touch with Chris and Kevin every week was necessary. They were always really quick on responses and edits to contracts. They helped ensure that we met all of the scope items within our MVP.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I think the most noteworthy thing about working with them is the fact that they’re not one of these huge nationwide companies; rather, they have an interest in your project because they’re here locally. They will take more of a vested interest in not only finding you talent but also checking up along the way. If something isn’t right, they’ll come on-site to talk through what changes can be made.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Although being a local company is great from my perspective, one of the things they will naturally have a challenge with is finding all local talent. That was not a requirement of ours, but had they been able to find mostly local talent, I think we would’ve been able to extend some of the contracts even longer, whereas some of the talent that they sent us was nearshore. From our HR and legal perspectives, we try to keep some of those contracts to certain time parameters.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Set a time for you to check-in with your point of contact. The bi-monthly checkpoint helped us clear up communication rather quickly.