Sean Devlin, contacted Net Solutions in 1997 to build a flash website. After that, he joined Monster.com and worked on some cutting edge features for them. After almost a decade Net Solutions heard from Sean again. Sean had partnered Brad Downs to work on a revolutionary online product, which has subsequently rewritten how universities across United States manage their sport athletes, recruits, alumni and events. The product is Frontrush. The success story continues with many records broken and accolades earned. Net Solutions, a part of this phenomenon right from the inception, is proud to be the development outsourcing partner for the premier University Sports Management System.

The project started as fixed price project in early 2006. During the pre-sales stage itself, we did some rapid screen mock ups and quickly went to development. Manoj Kalra, who had joined Net Solutions a few months back was the lead developer for the project. The project was developed much ahead of schedule and we were discussing Phase II of the project in May 2006 itself. While the first phase of the project was mostly about creating basic functionality for coaches and assistant coaches to manage recruits, rosters, notes and duties - the phase II added the calendar for events/ duties/ notes as well as stronger administrative control. Like Phase I, Phase II was also completed ahead of schedule and in late 2006, we were already to Phase III. Phase III focused on personalization of each coaches area with custom form fields, stronger search features and interactive AJAX features. As Phase III was being developed, the product was under extensive testing and demo at target universities and through some coaches. It was also the time when the first sales were made. Up till Phase III, we had worked on a fixed price approach. We quoted for each Phase, delivered a project plan and delivered much earlier. This was in large part due to an effective product owner role played by Sean. Sean made himself available at India times, almost every time we needed him to be available. He gave feedback quickly, helped us work in short weekly cycles, maintained a very clear prioritized requirements roster based on approved features for each phase and keep our focus on particular week’s deliverables. All the three releases [I, II and III] were delivered without any priority 1 or 2 bugs and much ahead of schedule. The application was beginning to take shape.

It was roughly around a year since Net Solutions and Frontrush had been working together. Also, the product was now in the market. The changes, customizations and support requests for each university were different than others. In addition, strategic liaisons with third party products like email template makers were being explored. At this stage, Net Solutions introduced the idea of abandoning Phase wise approach and working with a requirement roster for only few weeks. Sean agreed to try out the idea. Sean agreed to the idea and discussed the same with Brad as well, who seemed excited about the idea. Net Solutions history of good deliveries and retaining the same team only helped make the decision easier. While coming to Phase III, we had already demolished the hierarchical structure of project management from the project altogether and Manoj was the primary contact for the project for Sean. Going forward, Manoj was primary contact for Sean with a Business Analyst helping Sean define requirements/ acceptance test criteria as needed. The first test of this engagement was a delivery 6 sprints later. A lot of functionality - search, performance, usability and also a critical email template integration for emails being sent from Frontrush by various coaches was being deployed. And we were able to do this on time. After this, the team really took off. Sean and Manoj were on MSN almost daily discussing priorities, checking features and making each sprint a success. The whole of 2007 saw Sean and Brad travel across United States and add one prestigious client after another. The development team in India supported them through quick turn around of demo requests, feature integrations with existing university websites as well as customizing any parts of Frontrush as needed. In late 2007, the team grew even more as we worked on releasing yet another Frontrush product - Camper : a solution on the lines of Frontrush, but targeted at recruit screening camps. The team once again pulled off the product and integration in less than 03 months. In the meanwhile as Frontrush continued to grow, we also worked on support, performance tuning and upgrades.

Frontrush has been a delightful journey for all involved. Net Solutions holds Frontrush as one of its premier projects and is working with FR team in US to now increase the market lead even further.

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