Great British Scaleup: Shift Left

This is the sixth in a series of short profiles of the companies featured in our fifth Great British Scaleup event held earlier this month.

At our Great British Scaleup event, aspiring Great British Scaleup Shift Left Group impressed us with its passion for improving quality and testing to ‘make IT better’ for its clients. Managing Director David Rigler and Sales Director Alan Upton co-founded Shift Left in 2015 to support quality throughout the entire software and IT lifecycle. They are on a mission to enable enterprises to implement digital transformation and IT change more quickly, efficiently and effectively,with less risk and greater confidence. As the company name suggests, they achieve this by focusing on moving quality earlier in the IT lifecycle – by shifting it left.

Shift Left’s business model is based on the premise that although many IT services (including quality assurance and testing) have become commoditised, many providers lack the necessary real world experience, expertise, thought leadership and stakeholder management capabilities required to deliver real value to the customer. Similarly, customer organisations struggle to capitalise on the cost efficiencies and economies of scale these providers offer, due to insufficient internal expertise. Shift Left’s expert consultants fill this gap and have been called upon to manage both on and offshore providers on behalf of a range of big name clients in the logistics, retail, government and building sectors.

Entirely self-funded to date, Shift Left is on track to turn over more than £3m this year and is planning the next phase of its scale up journey. This is likely to involve recruiting more sales people and permanent consultants to relieve pressure on the current team and taking on more managed services contracts. A particular focus over the next 12 months will be extending their proposition through the use of partners in areas such as data virtualisation and environment management, which help raise the level of quality throughout the IT lifecycle. We look forward to following Shift Left Group’s progress into 2019 and beyond.

Posted by Tola Sargeant at '14:53' - Tagged: testing   consulting   sme   scaleup