Background
Psycowin is a leading Human Resources Management software provider, with products that help HR managers determine skills, evaluate employees, and predict performance. In business since 1987, they have become the de-facto human resources application in Latin America; a majority of the region's top corporations use their software to manage various HR functions.
A core component of their offering is the evaluation of potential employees based on various psychological factors. Traditionally HR managers would take up to two hours to build an accurate psychographic profile of potential employees. With Psycowin's software, that process has been cut down to 10 minutes, freeing up an HR manager's time to more valuable activities.
The Challenge
Since their start, almost 20 years ago Psycowin’s products have gained considerable market share. At the same time, company president José Villarreal realized that fast moving changes in technology were threatening to make his technology obsolete – so he decided to take quick action.
Villarreal recognized the need to upgrade their software architecture from a client/server on-premise model, to an on-demand model. Additionally, due to the changing requirements and sophistication of his corporate clients and their widespread adoption of ERP applications, they needed more than a stand-alone employee evaluation system. Villarreal saw that Psycowin had to provide a complete solution to meet the needs of his customers’ Human Resources processes. That's when the Psycowin team decided to develop their new product, Pyxoom, an HR application with built-in workflows delivered using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.
However, Psycowin faced several challenges. The recent economic recession forced Psycowin to cut resources, including development staff. Additionally, the new SaaS delivery model required a new skill set that Psycowin’s current development staff was not entirely comfortable with.
Villarreal decided that in order to market the system quicker without waiting for his developers to become fully versed in web services methodologies, and at the same time to keep his current staff lean, he needed to hire an outside software development firm. Psycowin was already working with two clients who had requested this type of application and required urgent delivery. He needed to work with a company that could provide him a guaranteed delivery date on a fixed-cost basis.
The Solution
Psycowin hired Sieena, a Los Angeles-based application development firm and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with nearshore development offices in Monterrey, Mexico.
Due to the time-sensitive nature of the project, they hired Sieena because of its solid development processes, years of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development experience, and expertise working with mission-critical HR applications. Finally, Sieena agreed to offer a guaranteed delivery date and a fixed-cost contract.
What Sieena brought to Psycowin's Pyxoom project was a methodology that helped them develop the application on time and on budget, with the exact requirements the company's HR and organizational psychology subject matter experts required.
- Project Management: Sieena's experience as a software outsourcing business have made them experts in project management. They assigned a project management team to organize and plan the execution of the project, and provided training and oversight to Psycowin’s developers, who were already expert coders but needed assistance with web applications.
- Development: The project was divided into different modules; each of them followed three different steps. Following iterative development, the project team was able to finish in record time while meeting all the project goals including the full scope and high quality demanded by Psycowin.
Discovery: After a substantial discovery process that included interviews with Psycowin’s developers and the company's subject-matter experts; Sieena analyzed the company's needs and wrote a detailed requirements document that served as the basis for the project.
Planning: The functional requirements from the discovery phase were translated into a design document which mapped out in detail how the software should be built. This document provided Psycowin’s developers a guide to write the code and build the application.
Development: Psycowin's developers were able to build Pyxoom based on the discovery and planning documents. Through code and design reviews, all deliverables from the developers were carefully reviewed and improved to maintain the high quality standards Sieena expects from its own development team.
Psycowin's developers, with guidance from Sieena's project management team, built the application using Microsoft development tools such as ASP.NET 3.5, MS Chart Control, SQL Server 2008, Reporting Service and Dundas Chart. Sieena provided special guidance related to the multi-tenant requirements of the application's SaaS architecture, and provided an infrastructure robust enough to manage terabytes of data.
The Benefits
Villarreal was satisfied with the final results; before the financial crisis, he always made sure Psycowin had enough resources to cover any development challenges that might arise. However, as a result of the economic crisis he realized it was difficult to maintain additional resources on staff while the market remained unstable.
“With Sieena I was able to ramp up quickly without having to add fixed costs to my bottom line,” Villarreal said. “Sieena helped me develop a new product so I could avoid hiring additional developers or waste valuable time waiting for my current resources to ramp up on web services technologies.”
Additionally, Sieena, together with Psycowin's development staff, was able to complete the project in 8 weeks from beginning to end, enabling them to deliver an initial version of the product to two of Psycowin's customers who required urgent delivery.
Finally, Psycowin leveraged Sieena's HR expertise to deliver an HR application with a workflow system that was very practical, easy-to-use and required no additional configuration.
“I'm going to continue working with Sieena to develop new products with them,” Villarreal said.
Since 2004, Sieena, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has provided comprehensive IT support and nearshore software development services, including Rich Internet Applications and customized SharePoint portals. The award-winning Sieena development staff has built and maintained business-critical Web platforms for small-to-medium businesses up through large multi-national corporations. To learn more about how Sieena can meet your software development goals, e-mail us at contactus@sieena.com or visit our Web site at www.sieena.com.