GBKSOFT

We started out looking for a website dev shop that would be communicative, professional and leverage established technologies to build us a website. After interviewing multiple US based and International firms, I discovered GBKSoft. Having worked with a number of offshore development companies over the years, I have experienced numerous projects that suffered from poor communication, poor project management and underestimation (time and $).

So I proceeded with some caution as we started our website development project. Right from the start, I was impressed with their communication, well written and verbose project documentation as well as the organization skills of the project manager. They use industry tools to collaborate and document progress as well as actively communicate with the client. At no point in the development process did I feel unaware of the progress or the budget/timeline was tracking. They are very good at cost estimation and time estimation, a skill which can be hard to come by in software development.

Our experience with the website development was so positive that we decided to embark on another, much more ambitious (multi-year) development effort with GBK. This project that was a first to market technology for our industry that was loaded with logic calculations and complexity to produce valuations based on a multitude of changing factors. The specifications process alone took 6 months in which time GBK documented every aspect of functionality in great detail prior to writing any code. It was the most comprehensive and well written spec doc I had been delivered in years!

The project took an additional 18 months to complete and GBK provided not only the development, but also the critical thinking and logic suggestions that go into building a complex web app. In many cases, the process felt very collaborative. They also kept the same developers staffed to our project through the build. This ensured that we could implement changes very quickly without waiting for new developers to be on-boarded. Our project manager was highly communicative at all hours and we used tools such as Trello and Slack to stay in constant communication and manage the project tasks.

Over the years, my team has even travelled the GBK office in Kyiv on multiple occasions to visit the development team and have onsite workshops to clarify development needs and requirements. GBK accommodated us on each visit and went above and beyond.

I many ways, this dev project has been a wonderful partnership and not just a "for-hire" project team. I would highly recommend them to anyone for any size project.

Our small business has struggled for more than a decade to find a software solution to manage the processes of our niche industry as manufacturers of highly customized construction materials. We've spent tens of thousands of dollars testing existing products, but everything has been either totally unable to adapt to our workflow, a clunky glorified Access database with a UI so slow to work with that it's not worth the bother, or more often both. I have some background in web development, enough to mock up a few skeletal pieces of a larger application that were enough to convince me that a better solution was possible - if we had the time and money to create a custom application, which I was sure we didn't.

And then we heard about GBK. From the earliest conversations with them last summer, I was impressed by their professionalism. They asked excellent questions and very quickly grasped the complexities of our business and industry. When they quoted us a price and timeframe, the numbers were excellent - they proposed to have a minimum viable product ready in just six months, for a price competitive with buying off-the-shelf business software - but I, jaded as I was by years of sales pitches that never delivered, took those numbers with a grain of salt. When was the last time a software project came in on time and on budget, after all?

Well, it turns out the answer to that question is "January". That's when GBK completed the designated scope of work right in the proposed six month timeframe, and indeed came in slightly under budget. This was possible because their highly competent and communicative project managers and business analysts worked closely with me to work through every contingency. I have a good head for thinking through a workflow and identifying issues before they happen, but GBK's team put me to shame on that front. There were no unanticipated delays precisely because they were so good at anticipating what would delay us. The hardest thing I had to do in the entire process was just to keep up with their tremendous productivity.

I only wish our budget was unlimited, so that we could continue working with them on this project indefinitely. It's been a phenomenal experience. The new software is now being implemented and we expect it to pay for itself within just two or three years through reduced quality issues and improved productivity and morale. The user interface is elegant, attractive, and thoughtfully designed at every level; no clicking through eighteen different forms just to accomplish a single daily task, as with so many of the solutions we've seen. They even managed to implement what I'm fairly sure is an almost entirely unique in-browser PDF editor connecting PDF annotations to database objects - a feature which is, on its own, going to make an entire department noticeably more productive while also eliminating several possible sources of errors. The end result fits our business like a glove, and all for a price that was within the reach of even our small business.

In the end, it was probably good for us to search fruitlessly for a solution so long, since it forced us to think through our business logic more than most companies do. Still, I wish I could go back in time to tell myself about GBKSoft in 2010. The least I can do is make sure others know how much time and frustration they can avoid by working with such a professional, competent team of web development experts.