Quickly assembling specialised tech teams for Humboldt University

Excellence Cluster (Image Knowledge Gestaltung) within The Humboldt University set out to build a learning management system for an interdisciplinary course, Open Design, for both German and international students. The goal was to build a tool to keep both lecturers and students engaged with the course, by providing information about teaching progress, exchanging learning materials and facilitating communication between lecturers and their students.

2. Choosing a tech agency

As the Excellence Cluster looked to implement the project concept developed by its research staff, they decided to outsource web development to a tech agency. The Project Leader started considering tech teams both based in Germany and abroad.

3. Overcoming previous bad experience

Having had a bad experience of working with freelancers in the past, the client looked for someone who would deliver, take ownership of the project and maintain good communication with the university project team.

4. Handling multiple projects at once

The university cooperates on a project basis with its tech partners, often running several research projects simultaneously. As these projects require different tech skills and specialisations, the client also looked to engage with tech partners that would suit the project scope the best.

Solution

Finding a reliable tech team within 2 weeks

The Project Leader could not find a suitable team in Germany and started looking for options abroad. He approached Trustshoring to get recommendations for teams from Eastern Europe to perform the first nearshoring project. It took us only two weeks to find the team matching the requirements and facilitate project kick-off.

Conclusion

With Trustshoring, it took the client only two weeks to find a suitable team in Ukraine and start working on the project. After the first matching happened, we helped the client find complementary teams to join other tech projects over the next four years.