We help Research & Science organizations achieve their goals using technology
Our proven intake process helps organizations quickly and clearly understand the needs and requirements associated with achieving their goals. Our team then works hand-in-hand with our clients to craft and implement efficient plans that achieve success.
How we help
We work with our clients to think through their needs, develop a project plan & estimate, resource the engineering effort, and visualize progress.
Our team can help your organization reduce costs by up to 80%—or, conversely—increase output by 5x.
Watch our CEO and founder, Casey, discuss our approach as the keynote speaker at a recent conference.
How do we seamlessly work with your internal team?
Watch this video to learn more about our “Space Station Approach” to leveraging the best elements of your internal team and the flexible capacity and skillset that our team brings.
Case studies from our recent work
Prominent national laboratory: About to manage 60+ Drupal sites with ease
Before: Difficulty managing the context/complexity of 200 department websites and associated systems.
After: Used Ricochet to develop a common “template site” that could be used by any department for 5-10% of the previous time/cost to develop a website. Able to spin up new sites with ease with very little overhead.
Confidential Fortune 5 Healthcare Company: Facilitates complex business process workflow apps in 1/5 the time
Before: Extremely complex application and business process needs required significant business analyst and engineering cycles to understand and develop.
After: Able to clearly and easily understand business needs, estimate as a team, and complete engineering efforts quickly.
Confidential Fortune 5 Technology Company: Key business initiative, understood and developed commenced in less than 30 days
Before: Unable to wrap their collective minds around a key internal initiative.
After: Clear understanding of the business need with feedback from all key stakeholders and business units. Engineers resourced and project underway in less than 30 days.
UC Berkeley: Features added to complex class search system by engineers with no previous experience in the tool
Before: Difficulty extending their complex class search tool because
After: Clear understanding of the business need with feedback from all key stakeholders and business units. Engineers resourced and project underway in less than 30 days.
Software development should be simpler.
Casey shares how simple the process can be during a sit-down interview.
How much will your project cost?
Every project we help with goes through our quick “5x5” intake process. A dashboard overview is created and shared with you for real-time analytics around the performance of engineers on your project.
Everything gets an estimate, and every minute is tracked.
We compare estimates to actuals in real-time, and developers bubble up innovative “80% solutions” whenever any task is estimated to go beyond the estimate.
You will never be surprised by cost ever again. And you’ll always know exactly where every dollar was spent.
Our secret sauce
We utilize the Pareto Principle and Parkinson’s Law to focus on the elements of your initiative that deliver the most value.
This is how we come in up to 80% under budget on some initiatives!
Request a free copy of our latest book.
Book a quick call to get a price
Why do engineering teams make things so complicated?
Learn more about how we help clients transform complicated things into simple-to-understand problems with straightforward solutions.
What our customers have to say
“Ricochet allowed us to bring our vision of an e-commerce style class search to life. We had a tight budget and a lot of unexpected problems on the Berkeley side. Utilizing Ricochet's state-of-the-art tracking tools and disciplined scrum approach allowed us to surmount every challenge and end up with a fantastic application. We loved the creative collaboration that allowed us to remake a boring campus class schedule into a high-octane search tool that our students and faculty love! Thank you Casey and the whole PR team!”
— JOHANNA METZGAR | UC Berkeley
“As an academic group, we wanted to improve the look and feel of our website on a tight budget. The team at Project Ricochet was consistently responsive to our concerns and willing to help us meet our goals. They were transparent with their costs, which allowed us to pick and choose which features and changes we deemed most important. Thanks to this transparency, our new website is a substantial improvement over the old that we were able to achieve in a cost-effective fashion.”
— JUSTIN INMAN | UC San Francisco
“Ricochet has been an invaluable partner in the development of our Drupal sites. Working with Casey, he lent a critical eye to our requirements to understand the feature set and objectives. During development, he was able to propose alternative implementations or creative solutions which met the requirements in an elegant and efficient manner. All the while, Casey maintained perspective on the user experience, to ensure that the product was not only bug free, but also easy to use an navigate. Furthermore, I could rely on Casey to keep me informed of issues and status with timely updates. I would not hesitate to turn to Ricochet for upcoming projects.”
— CASEY CHEUNG | Future US Publishing
“Casey Cobb and the team at Ricochet have that right balance of high-touch professionalism while being true "geeks" at heart. They are adaptive and flexible, with a keen sense of what it takes to keep a project on track -- and an understanding that the client's goals and priorities may continuously evolve.”
— GREG MERRITT | UC Berkeley
“The Ricochet team is great to work with. They work hard to understand not just what we want, but also what we need.”
—DAVID STEVEN | Broadview Mortgage
So, what is the solution to engineering over-complication?
Casey discusses how our team works with our clients, large and small.
Frequently Asked questions
How do you start an engagement?
We start a client engagement with a phone call to talk over the challenges that the potential client is facing to ensure that we fully understand the problem—and are equipped to help solve it.
Once we ensure that we fully understand, we typically suggest a small engagement to deep-dive into the issues and develop a proposed solution, along with an estimate and detailed plan for moving forward.
What services do you offer?
Needs assessment/discovery
Project estimation (in hours or dollars)
Technology selection
Staff augmentation
Project management
Project management training
Engineering tooling for efficiency
Reporting and analytics around the engineering process
My existing team is struggling. Can you help?
Software engineering can be challenging. There are myriad reasons why a team might be struggling.
The reasons why may include:
High turnover or a recent linchpin leaving for another job
Unclear requirements
Lack of sufficient resources
Demanding customers
Insufficient tooling
Mixed/confused roles & responsibilities
When engaging a client, our initial assessment/solution will include answers to the above concerns—along with any others that arise in the course of our discussions or engagement.
Will I become dependent on you?
Our goal from day one is to make our clients entirely self-sufficient. We bring our approach, methodology, tooling & training, and help our clients master the process of software development on their own. We find that clients often elect to maintain an active engagement because they enjoy and appreciate the support, on-demand scale-up/down staff-augmentation, and performance management/visualization/reporting capabilities we bring with us. But at no point are our clients entirely dependent on us.
How much does it cost to work with you?
Our pricing is completely transparent. We add a simple markup to our cost for engineers that we resource for you and we can typically beat competing agency prices by a significant margin, with the added benefit of on-demand scalability for any project or need.