May 10, 2023
FundEasy, an events management platform designed to help nonprofits streamline and manage donations and events, started with a small development team. As its services and users grew, the team expanded to work with an offshore team for several years.
"We were originally attracted to the idea of offshore software development as a way to save money, as the price per developer seemed substantially lower," said Liz Chechile, General Manager of FundEasy.
However, over time, FundEasy noticed the offshore team was not as productive as they had hoped. The development process was slow, and requirements and deliverable expectations were lost in translation. The 7-hour time difference also made coordination to resolve issues difficult. Delays due to miscommunication or lack of coordination led to longer development timelines and higher-than-anticipated costs. Internal changes also raised questions about technical leadership needs and additional resources.
FundEasy struggled with the lack of progress and quality of work from their offshore development team and wanted to find a more long-term US-based solution. FundEasy engaged fraction, a platform connecting growing companies with elite fractional developers, to help put development back on track.
Fraction was founded to help startups and growing companies access the best developers in the United States by hiring them in long-term, part-time ("fractional") positions. “We work exclusively with US-based senior developers because they operate at a higher level of productivity, enabling them to effectively manage their full-time roles while also making impactful contributions to our client part-time engagements,” said Praveen Ghanta, CEO + Co-founder of Fraction.
By tapping into the productivity boost of US-based fractional developers, fraction helps growing companies overcome communication and time zone barriers, enabling Fraction's developers to accomplish more than full-time offshore developers.
Starting with their technical leadership needs, fraction helped FundEasy onboard a fractional technical lead with over 20 years of experience with several Fortune 500 companies. Within the first two weeks, the FundEasy fractional technical lead led an architectural overview, identified areas for improvement, and provided recommendations to complete FundEasy’s transition from its legacy application to an updated version.
“Our fractional technical lead took charge right away and identified key areas we needed to address to accelerate our transition. We saw immediate value within the first month of the engagement,” said Sandy Barton, Product Owner. “We realized we needed to expand our development team needs to execute on these recommendations.”
With the guidance of fraction’s Software Architect, FundEasy expanded its team to include 2 fractional Senior Full-Stack Developers. The fractional development team quickly got to work and worked closely with the FundEasy team to update the existing database structure, manage front-end impacts, and address legacy application maintenance.
As part of the Fraction model, fraction guarantees success by including project management, product management, and software architecture guidance as part of every engagement.
“Working with an experienced, US-based development team who understood our needs made a huge difference, but additional oversight and feedback from fraction’s MIT-educated Software Architect gave us even more reassurance that the technical approach aligned with our business objectives,” said Chechile.
With Fraction's help, FundEasy accelerated its transition to update its application from several years to several months. “Before fraction, we were on a 5-year roadmap to complete our transition to the new application,” said Barton. “But with fraction, we were able to accelerate this to less than a year and expect the heavy lifting to be done in Q2 2023!”
Fraction's fractional development team worked closely with FundEasy to deliver a smooth transition to an updated application, including an improved platform experience with streamlined functionality and enhanced security. The team also took over legacy application maintenance.
Finally, FundEasy was able to reduce costs by working with Fraction. Through fraction’s model, FundEasy was able to access US-based developers, project management, software architecture at a competitive rate. In addition to this, overall project costs of were lower due to the improved productivity and efficiency of the development process.
“The fraction model not only helped us build a US-based fractional development team, but the built-in project management and software architecture gave us additional reassurance and transparency,” said Chechile.
