Client: Seed&Spark

Challenge

Seed&Spark sought to build a proprietary Learning Management System (LMS) for curricula that had been previously delivered with a hodge podge of technologies. Their goal was to improve user experience by introducing new features that were not possible on the legacy platform.

Seed&Spark had an aggressive delivery timeline. While they had worked on designs with a previous supplier, many of the designs had to be reassessed and adjusted as they navigated through the project, which was not included in the original scope. Under normal circumstances, either the delivery timeline or cost would need to change to accommodate the additional scope; this was not possible in this project.

Solution

Workstate partnered with Seed&Spark to find ways to absorb some of the work and deprioritize aspects of the project that were not necessary for their launch. Workstate assumed ownership of the architectural design of the platform based on Seed&Spark’s business requirements, which included platform stability, uptime, accessibility, security, and interoperability with APIs. Additionally, Seed&Spark wanted to select broadly adopted technologies to ensure continuing platform support beyond the delivery of their MVP.

Working with Seed&Spark, the Film Forward application was built in AWS, supported by RDS Aurora Serverless, Elastic Container Service hosted on Fargate with an Elastic Load Balancer (ALB) to manage traffic. Additionally, all static assets were stored in the CloudFront Content Delivery Network.

Results

Seed&Spark released an MVP earlier this year on time and on budget. Additionally, only three tickets were logged into their support desk during the first week following the launch. The client reported, “I’ve been working in tech for a long time, and this outcome is unheard of. As a product leader, you always anticipate and plan for some aspect of a launch to inevitably go sideways, but this was the smoothest delivery I’ve ever experienced. It speaks to the quality and care with which Workstate developed the new platform.”

Seed&Spark noted, “We really benefited from the clarity of Workstate’s plan and their commitment to deliver it. There were points throughout the product development process where potential delivery delays were forecasted, and Workstate was able to provide a temporary surge team to get us back on schedule. This engagement was a true partnership, and Workstate’s commitment to help us achieve Seed&Spark’s goals was evident throughout.”