Price will always be a factor when trying to win a contract. However, cheap labor is never a sustainable competitive advantage.

We stand behind the results of what we do and offer much more than simple cost saving.

management consulting

Our primary goal is to efficiently tailor the development team that will be assigned to you in accordance with your technical and business requirements. This is the key factor for establishing a fruitful cooperation and making the project a success.

We consult our clients on the full range of topics related to offshore outsourcing and remote software development while taking into consideration the customer's specific needs and goals.

Having been in the IT industry from the early 90-ties, we are fully qualified to advise our clientele on IP protection and other legal issues, the conditions of the local IT labor market, required skills specifications, efficient compensation structure and motivation techniques, effective retention policies, communication channels and procedures, team-building processes, methods and tools of collaboration. We will knowledgeably inform you about the existing cultural differences, risks involved, and operational procedures that will be required for the successful management of your project.

Furthermore, we will assist you with the most critical issue of designing a highly efficient team structure based on the analysis of the client's business goals and existing resources, technologies and development tools involved, specifics of remote software development, and availability of offshore labor resources.

The next important step is the client's active participation in the selection of the team members. We don't sell "technical positions", but we create a team of professionals, fully tailoring it to the client's needs to serve as a natural extension of the client's in-house staff and resources.

Setting up the Process

Brightgrove has solid experience in team-building and always keeps abreast of all the latest technologies and new trends in software development outsourcing. We set up full-scale software development and security environments by building from scratch all the required development, communication, collaboration, and staff management processes. Although it is based on the established industry standards and best practices, each process is adjusted in accordance with the client's specific needs, as well as their business environment, corporate policies and culture.

Monitoring and Supervising

After building the team and efficiently implementing the required processes, Brightgrove continues to actively manage all the aspects of the team's work and its cooperation with the client. Our extensively experienced and highly competent technical managers continuously monitor and supervise the implementation of the project requirements, system architecture compliance, project plans, quality of the code and that of the project-related documentation, team performance, and even the "team spirit". The customer receives regular, detailed reports on all the above and makes the required adjustments. In addition, a dedicated manager supervises the reporting, legal and financial issues and ensures customer satisfaction through frequent communication with the customer.

The distinct advantages that Brightgrove offers its customers can be summed up as follows:

  • A better understanding of offshore outsourcing and the specifics of remote development
  • An offshore team being a natural extension of the customer's in-house staff and full control over this team's activities
  • Technical oversight and management
  • Continuous improvement of the cooperation
  • Improved overall operational efficiency
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agile project management

Iterative development is a core component of our strategic approach to software delivery. When you work with Brightgrove, you don't have to wait until the end of the project to receive tangible, testable deliverables. We divide each engagement into iterations that produce working versions of the product our clients can actually use.

  • Each iteration allows for client feedback and proactive "course corrections" to ensure that the solution is in compliance with the original vision and business goals and not just with the technical specification.
  • Each iteration starts with a brief on the previous iteration and a planning and analysis session, involving both the client and the Brightgrove team.
  • A formal iteration review process is supplemented by the continuous delivery of functionality through weekly or daily builds that grant the user ongoing access for testing and reviewing.
  • Major functional elements are grouped into formalized releases that represent the critical project milestones.

Iterative Development Keeps Projects on Course

One of the worst things that may happen to a software development project is getting too far down the line and only then realizing that there are major functionality or usability issues.

Brightgrove addresses this core risk through one of the industry's most responsive iterative development and testing methodologies. We divide the development effort into iterations that provide our clients with early versions they can use and test. Besides, the very approach to the development process we employ reliably allows for the possibility of correcting the course of the development whenever required. You are never in the dark. All the issues, risks, and roadblocks are identified and addressed as early as possible. Our agile software development methodology anticipates changes and allows us to correct the course of the development quickly, thus ensuring that your project stays consistent with your business objectives.

Prototyping: Increasing Efficiency

Brightgrove uses a special form of iteration called a Prototype Iteration, typically planned and executed at the start of a project in order to explore the unknown or risky elements. This process allows us to address specific unknown issues aggressively and rapidly to ensure that all the hurdles in the project are removed. Prototype Iterations help us manage the risks by identifying the high-risk items and focusing on resolving these issues.

Managing Risks

Brightgrove manages and mitigates the risks of major projects through a unique approach that combines an industry-leading agile methodology with a focus on the customer company's business objectives and a broad set of technology competencies that includes both data and application development.

The biggest risk you can be faced with in a software launch is that there is a flaw in the solution: the product isn't quite viable on the market, it doesn't meet your business objectives, it isn't feasible in your timeframe and budget ,or it cannot simply be properly built using the technology and specifications that you have designated and provided.

You should be looking for a solution development partner who can more than just write code. You need a partner who:

  • develops high-quality products and provides high-quality services through a process that takes into account the full product lifecycle considerations
  • helps you ensure that your solution is aligned with your business objectives
  • has industry-leading experience in all the major platforms and architectures
  • can give your team a full view of the project at all times

Real-Time Development Updates

Brightgrove uses an integrated suite of tools to provide real-time visibility throughout the project lifecycle. Our online project dashboard is based on wiki community- building principles and technologies and fosters highly productive communication among the Brightgrove development teams. We render these tools available to our clients.

Our web-based project collaboration portal provides:

  • Requirements management
  • Project status updates
  • An electronic project planning board
  • Defect tracking
  • Current build of the software (daily builds)
  • Source control
  • A story repository
  • Issue management
  • Project metrics / cost / hours
  • Billing information
  • Quality metrics measurement
  • Management reporting

Focus and Experience

Brightgrove can manage the development of any complex solution better than anyone in the industry because that's what we do. We were founded to help companies deliver these solutions to the marketplace: we know the pitfalls, we know the issues, and we know how to work around them and ensure that a quality, strategically sound product gets to market on time and on budget.

When you hire a development company for a major business initiative, you can't afford to lose sight of any part of the project. You need a team you can trust and a partner that gives up-to-the-minute feedback every step of the way. You need continuous updates on:

  • Overall project progress
  • Key deliverables
  • Costs
  • Risks
  • Technology issues
  • Market issues

You also need a partner that can help you gain visibility into the marketplace with ongoing feedback built into the process.

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recruiting process

The recruiting process depends on your requirements for the team and your preferences. It can be handled internally, or you may be fully involved and interview and screen personally every candidate. We have a really flexible recruiting process and ready to adjust it according to your needs and expectations. After the internal screening and skills evaluation, we furnish you with the candidate's resume, a brief summary of the internal assessment, including our vision as to the amount of the compensation the candidate should be entitled to, the fringe benefits, and the potential salary growth. Optionally, we can organize the following activities in order to inform you about the candidate's experience at a greater depth:

  • Interview - an interview between you and the candidate that can be conducted over the phone, by skype, or through a conference call.
  • Online assessment - as part of the screening process, you could ask the candidates to take a certain skill test, such as, for example, BrainBench.
  • Test task - You could ask the candidates to send in sample work or their portfolios, as well as assign a short test task that will verify the ability of the candidate to perform a specific job.

In general, our goal is to make a perfect match between the job requirements and the candidate's skills. It is in our own interest to make sure that you have the very best person for each of your profiles so that there is a higher chance of the project's overall success.

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retention strategy

Retention is as important as recruitment, since it concerns employees whose knowledge is specific for the project and our customers, and whose training has required considerable time and money investments. Losing such employees is always fraught with vast material and non-material expenses, especially today, when a company's value is measured by the number of its qualified staff. Acknowledging this, we have developed and implemented a retention strategy that includes the following points:

  • Open information about the career prospects and opportunities for our employees. Employees can also find some information about the company, its achievements, corporate news, and so on - for them to understand where they are working, what position the company has in the industry, and how their contribution helps the company to grow.
  • We regularly conduct personal meetings with each employee to receive feedback about the existing problems or issues, if any, understand the employee's mood and help him or her solve any possible problems within the company.
  • Brightgrove offers special training programs for the company's employees, including individual coaching sessions, conducted by the top management. Project managers work with the people every day and they have to know how to do that.
  • We support our employees' initiative by encouraging reasonable and valuable proposals, rewarding their efforts with financial and non-financial incentives. We stimulate generation of ideas and our staff's participation in the company's daily life.
  • We try to raise Brightgrove's employees' interest in their work by giving them information on how the results of their work influence the company's success and how these results help our customers in developing their business, as well as by arranging personal meetings of the project groups with the customers' representatives.
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team motivation

We realize that our success rests on the high performance of our employees and their motivation to see themselves as a team of professionals who really enjoy what they do. At Brightgrove, we aim to create and maintain a positive work culture that would nurture creativity, integrity, and trust.

The following concepts represent the backbone of our culture:

Out-of-box thinking. We encourage our team-members to think innovatively and search for creative solutions to complex problems. We enjoy facing challenges and learning in the process of overcoming those. Operating in a highly competitive and dynamic environment, Brightgrove places its stake on the flexibility of its members, their capacity to embrace changes and take risks.

Transparency in communication. Brightgrove stands for an open work culture. Our team members feel free to approach their colleagues, share their vision and ask for information: the hierarchy here exists to organize the working process but not to create some communication barriers. Initiative and knowledge sharing are always welcome at Brightgrove. No feedback is ever disregarded or dismissed, be it positive or negative: experiencing mistakes, we have to learn from them and improve our skills, attitudes, and overall performance.

Flexible working hours. The amount of the working time is set according to the labor law and work contract. The work schedule of our employees is not a fixed-time one, and it can be modified at the request of any of the team members: to approve a custom schedule, we simply need to know that it is not at variance with the interests of the company and that it preserves the continuity of the working process. Appreciating our employees' aspiration for achieving good results, we do not, however, encourage any overtime work since it affects the employee morale and vitality and results in an increase in the project costs. If any overtime performance still gets approved, the project managers are required to provide monthly overtime reports for the appropriate material compensation to be paid.

Right balance between work and leisure. To preserve the ability of our team members to generate impressive results, we try to provide them with a positive and fun work atmosphere. Enjoying our work and spending good time together afterwards ensures employee satisfaction and a high level of loyalty toward the company.

Aspiration to knowledge. We believe in the continuity of learning and, therefore, encourage our team members to keep upgrading their knowledge and skills by providing them with an exhaustive library of technical and marketing literature. Our objective here is to keep track of the newest technologies, ideas, tools and processes that appear on the market and make this information easily available to our staff.

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ip protection

Brightgrove provides multi-level protection of its customer's intellectual property. The legal, logical and physical restrictions are used to ensure that any sensitive information is protected properly.

Legal security. Brightgrove has well-defined and documented security policies, processes, and guidelines in place for the reasonable protection of information at all the stages of the information life cycle. We sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement with each client and all the information Brightgrove receives from them is presumed confidential. Each new employee signs a Non-Disclosure Agreement with both Brightgrove and the customer company, if the latter is required.

Data security. Brightgrove has implemented the following rules in order to ensure the data security:

  • All data (the source code, documentation, intranet systems, databases, and so on) is stored and secured by our service provider.
  • The VPN connection is used in order to secure the data transfers.
  • IPSec is used for critical data flows' encryption.
  • System administrators monitor the "health" status of the hard drives with S.M.A.R.T., and perform regular backups of the data to backup the servers and DVD disks.
  • Web-based intrusions and attacks are prevented with Apache security modules, port-scanning system, and semi-automated PSAD for Linux iptables.
  • Employees' access rights to the different data sources, e.g. the version control system, project collaboration area, and so on, are granted depending on the project they are working on. Thus, if a developer works on a certain project, any information related to another customer or another project cannot be accessed by him. Access to the company environment can only be granted through domain authentication.

Network Security. Brightgrove's network is divided into segments to eliminate data saturation and to physically separate the teams, thus preventing any unauthorized access to/from a segment. Every network device has a properly configured firewall, antivirus and malware protection systems.

Physical Security. Access to the facilities is restricted through the usage of failsafe electric door locks to ensure that only the authorized personnel are allowed to enter. The reliable and secure electrical system responsible for this procedure has built-in redundancy that ensures power availability at all times. An intelligent fire/smoke detection and alarm system for notification and evacuation of personnel gives an early warning in case of fire. All rooms are equipped with fire extinguishers.

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