Dedicated Nearshore Development Team Helps Nonprofit Continue to Fund Scholarships During COVID Pandemic

Client Testimonial

Background

“Step Up for Students was in a very vulnerable position staffing-wise. We had been undergoing sweeping changes with some of our core development team that helped us deliver on our mission: to empower families to pursue and engage in the most appropriate learning options for their kids. We have 120,000-plus children on our scholarship programs today, and we’re trying to give those children more opportunities for a better education. That comes in the form of an educational savings account and the Florida legislature is helping us by making those changes and helping the scholarship community also by making those changes. Which means that we’ve got a lot of changes to make on our platform to adopt into that. 

We found ourselves in a position where we weren’t ready to undertake those changes. We wanted more flexibility. One year, we can get a lot of work from the legislature changes—in some cases internally as well to build efficiencies and things like that—and then another year, it can be a lot smaller. So we need to staff up, we need to staff down. 

We’re a small nonprofit; we’re not a technical IT organization. So we knew we needed to find a partner that could help us with professional, high-quality, experienced IT professionals. We went through an exhaustive search, and Praxent were the ones that topped the list.

The Challenge

We have much older software that we’re struggling to maintain, also a lack of staffing. I would say, for us in Jacksonville, I find that we don’t have a very wide talent pool to draw from in terms of our staff. It’s a small town, and people move through those people very quickly, so being able to tap into Latin American resources really helped us.

They brought new pools of employable people to us—people we would want on our teams—very quickly.

With the pandemic, I noticed what a lot of people are noticing: IT jobs are not local anymore; they don’t need to be local. Our IT staff, just like all other companies’ IT staff, can look across the country now, work from home, work for people who are on the East and the West coast, and make higher salaries. It’s very quick to get out if they want to. 

We’re finding no matter what benefits or offerings we can give, there was always something shinier out there, and the pandemic made that easier for people to find. Either it was they have something I want to play with, or I can work less hours because they’re on the West coast, or they’re paying me more. We had a challenge with just how do we maintain software people?

Why Praxent

We had someone field a number of vendors for us, and there were two that I spoke to. They were both very high quality, but I knew when I spoke to Praxent, right off the bat, the conversation felt very genuine. It felt like it came from a very neutral spot, not ‘This is how you should be doing things in IT.’ It was very much, ‘We want to understand before we do anything,’ and ‘We’ll work with you however you think is best. We’ll make recommendations; you don’t have to listen to them.’ It was very neutral, very unbiased, and very early on, I realized this was a partner that would care and that would be there for us.

The other partners just wanted to say what it took to get us to sign on the dotted line. They literally said that. They were very sales oriented, versus Praxent was very driven on the mission and what we needed.

There was a level of compassion in speaking with Kevin Hurwitz and the other people he had on the phone call that came right through. There was no guessing; I knew really quickly that this would be the right fit for us.

In our capacity with Praxent, what they brought to the table was a CodePath assessment that let us know where our IT department really stood in the world of IT departments.

They gave us a very fair and factual, unbiased CodePath assessment that was extremely intuitive and that we were able to interpret. It was also very actionable. That was something we needed; we needed to hear that. They also provided much-needed, high-quality staff for us: contractors to come in and learn. They just jumped right in and they went.

We also got a lot of great help from Kevin, Ryan, Eric, different people in the organization to help us with our best practices. Those were consultative services we weren’t even charged for, because the vendor cared. That’s not something you see every day.

For us as a nonprofit, we really felt that Praxent was the right partner for us, and Praxent has come through.

I don’t work day to day with the staff that we actually brought on, but it almost felt like day to day that we were talking with people like Kevin Hurwitz and Ryan Ostrom, and it was good. The conversations were very easy; they made us very comfortable. They were very supportive and willing to do anything to help the customer. I truly felt that from them, and to this day, I maintain that. We have calls with them just to see how things are going and what they can do for us and ‘What questions do you have about IT in general? How are you doing this? And have you ever thought about this? They’ve given me books to read about hiring and helped us with hiring processes for stuff and for things that don’t have anything to do with Praxent, just for our internal staffing up. I don’t know a lot of vendors that would do that.”

When we were onboarding, Craig and I were having a rough time with attrition. I remember us sitting on a call with Kevin. We didn’t have any tactical agenda; it was more like they were just there to listen to us. They could sense our frustration with what was going on: ‘How can we get out of this?’ and ‘Is this normal?’ It was just a friendly conversation. Just helping us with how to get out of this rut that we’re in and how to better hire people. It was very nice.

Offshoring Pros and Cons

As a nonprofit, we pay differently, and we can’t compete. Praxent brings to us the Latin American employment market. For us, that’s a big thing. It gives us that advantage; we can now compete. They hired a lead developer. We had been looking for one since January. Three months is a long time.

My assumption based on how fast they’re ramping up is that—and it’s consistent with what I’ve seen in the Latin American software engineering community—they’re thirsty. They’re hungry to do good work. And they value working for a U.S. company, because with the U.S. company experience, they can get a job anywhere in their country just by knowing they worked for an American firm. Everybody wants that U.S.-based experience. 

Results

If you’re not familiar with this term ‘sprint velocity,’ it’s kind of like a speedometer for how much you can develop and how fast. Our needle was pretty much around the zero figure, because we really just didn’t have the staff. They had moved on to different areas and moved outside of Step Up for Students. We have a project that has a very specific velocity number that must be hit per sprint. We were very concerned about how long it would take people to staff up and learn and onboard. I can tell you today that the last two sprints have exceeded those numbers.

So in terms of a metric, I think we have very clear evidence that the people we’ve brought on have been impactful and that they have helped us. The first week that one of them started—I believe his name is Juan—he removed potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of useless code in our system. He was very quickly identified to be a person that we could use on more complicated projects, and we moved him to a more complex project. The very first week it was clear to us about Praxent’s hiring process – I know that they use the ‘who’ method for hiring and scorecards. It is an astounding metric to look at, that Praxent have people who are that effective that quickly. It goes beyond Juan to just looking at the velocity and how well we’re doing, so I’m so pleased.

Every week we were showing the status report of some of our major projects, and they were in the red, which is just bad. Now they’re all on track. So there’s something to be said there.

I see the partnership continuing. Long term we will need some people from Praxent to continue with us. The compatibility of working with the Praxent team is there; it’s been great. 

There’s no unnecessary complexity involved in getting MSAs written, in getting statements of work written and approved—it’s very straightforward. Praxent is very clearly behind the people they serve. They’re not trying to hide behind all kinds of legal terms or things like that; they just want to get everything done and help. I would say that that is very evident.

Based on the four statements of work and the one MSA that we’ve signed with them, that objectivity, compassion, support. Those are the key things that jumped out at me.”

— Gina Lynch, COO and Craig Gonsalves, VP, IT Solutions – Step Up for Students