Three29

Project summary: Evolving open banking obligations required us to rebuild our API layer from the ground up. The architecture needed to be compliant by default, not bolted on after the fact.

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: A previous engagement had delivered something that worked in staging and struggled in production. We approached this project with greater rigour in vendor selection as a result.

Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.

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: 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 had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.

Project summary: B2B customer churn was concentrated among accounts that had complained about portal usability. We needed a complete redesign of the self-service experience before the next contract renewal cycle.

Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.

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.

The technical quality of the final deliverable is the easiest thing to point to. The automated test coverage is thorough, the deployment pipeline is reliable, the documentation is genuinely useful rather than ceremonially produced. But the metric I keep returning to is the number of post-launch conversations we have not had to have. No incident calls at two in the morning. No emergency patches. No retrospective discussions about what went wrong. The absence of those events is the evidence I would show to someone considering this vendor.

Project summary: Warehouse management inefficiencies were adding cost and introducing errors at a rate that was becoming visible to clients. A modernised WMS was the agreed solution internally — we needed a partner to build it.

The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.

Project summary: Our audience data was fragmented across eight tools with no single identity layer. Personalisation had become impossible without first solving the data foundation.

What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.

Project summary: As a technology business ourselves we apply the same scrutiny to our vendor selection that our clients apply to us. We needed a delivery partner who could meet a standard we would be comfortable being measured against.

What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.

Project summary: Our connected vehicle platform needed to handle telemetry data from an expanding EV fleet while supporting over-the-air update orchestration. No off-the-shelf platform handled both requirements well.

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: Serialisation requirements under new traceability legislation had a compliance deadline. Our supply chain system required targeted development to meet it — generalist knowledge was not sufficient.

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

The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.

Project summary: Our editorial team was managing content across seven different tools with no single source of truth — we needed a unified CMS that could handle structured and rich-media content equally well.

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.