The Challenge: To build digital products that positively affect the financial health of the 11 million annual visitors to the Money Advice Service website.
A long term supporting role
Cultivate were originally engaged to update a single tool, with the opportunity to provide ongoing support on other projects based on our heritage within Agile, Lean UX and Ruby on Rails. We worked hard from the beginning to create a transparent and collaborative partnership with The Money Advice Service’s (MAS) internal team. This has proven a valuable foundation – two years and many projects later, we continue to be a trusted pair of hands.
Focused Product Development
Cultivate provide full product development teams, comprising engineering, UX and visual design. This full team approach ensures MAS get the best product on time and in budget.
We are entrusted with the creation of new software products that form the basis of the organisation’s strategic capability. We work closely with internal teams and stakeholders to define, scope and deliver these products to the highest standard.
We continue to support MAS by:
- Running workshops to generate ideas, clarify project scope and set direction
- Delivering new high-priority software projects
- Bringing existing public-facing website 'tools' up to date
- Updating and enhancing existing projects
A trusted partner with broad and deep experience
Over the extended period of our work with MAS we’ve gained familiarity with a broad spectrum of projects and technologies giving us a unique ability to add value in many disparate areas.
Our whole team work full stack and even contribute on dev-ops when required. This breadth of capability has helped us build trust and rapport across the organisation from management to product-ownership, design to dev-ops and everything in between.
How do we work?
We are remote, but connected.
Being based in Edinburgh, we were engaged from the beginning as a remote team. Remote working is a skill ingrained in the Cultivate culture and ethos. It requires extra effort to be ‘present’ which we work hard to achieve.
We maintain our connection with regular communication:
- Daily standups
- Nightly emails with a burn-up chart showing progress
- Weekly demo & planning sessions
- Regular retrospectives
- Monthly onsite visits
- Always available online via Slack, Trello and VOIP
We were recently recognised for our collaboration and communication, winning ‘Best Supporting Agency’ at the 2015 MAS Digital Awards.
Handed over, but never 'thrown over the wall'.
Our primary role is currently kick-starting new projects. To be able to do so, when the time is right, we hand over development to an internal team. We deliver well documented, fully tested, high quality, clean code, deployed and ready for ongoing development.
