Think Design

Project summary: Digital service standards required all citizen-facing applications to meet accessibility and performance benchmarks that our inherited systems failed. Remediation was not viable — we needed a replacement.

The integration layer was the part of the project I was most concerned about going in. Our system landscape is complex, several of the upstream APIs we relied on were poorly documented, and two third-party vendors had a history of unpredictable response times on integration questions. This team managed all of that. They documented what the upstream vendors could not, built resilience into the integration architecture where the upstream behaviour was unreliable, and delivered a solution that works as specified in production. I could not have asked for more.

Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.

The project brief was ambitious and we had received proposals ranging from two to five times our eventual budget from other vendors. This team came back with a proposal that was commercially realistic and technically credible — and then delivered against it. That alignment between proposal and outcome is not something I take for granted. I have been on the other side of it enough times to know it requires both honesty in the sales process and discipline in delivery. We experienced both.

Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.

I came into this engagement as a sceptic. We had been through a failed implementation with a previous vendor and I had high standards for what evidence of competence looked like before I would trust a partner with our core systems. This team earned that trust progressively — through the quality of the discovery documentation, the rigour of the technical proposals, the consistency of the sprint deliveries, and ultimately the stability of the production system. I no longer lead with scepticism when recommending them.

Project summary: The transition to EV had created demand for dealer network management capabilities our existing system was not designed to support. A targeted rebuild was the agreed path forward.

We gave this team an aggressive timeline, a technically complex scope, and a client-side project team that was stretched thin and not always available at the speed the engagement required. They absorbed all of that gracefully. Where they needed input they were precise about what they needed and when. Where they could proceed independently they did. The result was a delivery that landed on time despite the constraints on our side, which I regard as evidence of genuine professional maturity.

Project summary: Claims fraud detection had been rule-based for years and we were losing ground to more sophisticated patterns — we needed a machine learning model built on our own historical data.

Our industry has specific compliance requirements that many generalist agencies struggle with. This team came with working knowledge of the relevant frameworks, asked pointed questions about our obligations, and built controls into the architecture rather than bolting them on at the end. Our compliance team reviewed the delivered system and had only minor observations, which is genuinely unusual for a first-pass review. That domain awareness saved us significant remediation cost.

Project summary: Customer churn was rising and our data showed that poor self-service experience was a primary driver — we needed a wholesale rebuild of our customer portal.

I have worked with development agencies on four continents over the past fifteen years and this team sits comfortably in the top tier. What separated them was not just technical skill, which was genuinely impressive, but their instinct for asking the right business questions before reaching for a technical answer. The project ran to schedule, the architecture is clean and well-documented, and the handover was thorough. Six months after go-live we have not raised a single critical support ticket. That speaks for itself.

Project summary: Underwriting decisions that should have taken minutes were taking days because of a legacy policy administration system that predated modern API architecture.

The technical quality of the work is the easiest thing to praise, but what I want to highlight is the communication culture on this team. Every question got a same-day response. Every risk got flagged before it became an issue. When we needed to change direction mid-project — a business decision on our side — they absorbed the change professionally, requoted fairly, and kept momentum going. That flexibility is something you cannot assess in a proposal and it turned out to be one of the most valuable things about working with them.

Project summary: Last-mile delivery performance had become a brand issue and we needed a real-time tracking and exception management platform that both our team and our clients could use.

We ran a structured RFP with seven vendors. Three made it to the technical evaluation stage. This team won on the strength of their technical proposal, their domain knowledge, and frankly on the quality of the questions they asked us during the process. A vendor who asks good questions in the sales phase tends to ask good questions during delivery too. That hypothesis proved correct. The project is now live, performing above the KPIs we agreed, and our stakeholders are genuinely impressed.