Explore

The first step is to call us and we can discuss your needs, over the phone or in person, whatever you're most comfortable with - contact details here.

If it sounds like something we can help you with, we should get together to talk it through in more detail. It's critical at this stage for us to really understand what you need.

During this first meeting we can discuss your options, and (depending on the complexity of your requirements) roughly scope out the project and provide you with an order-of-magnitude cost and timeframe estimate for the work. For more complex requirements we'd need to do a little more work to give you a cost and time estimate.

Scope

It's in both our interests that we have a clear understanding of your goals and requirements before we start creating something with you.

We need to know the most important aspects of the application which will determine its success. See an example of the key success factors section for one of our recent projects.

We can help make sure your requirements are clear. It's harder than it sounds, and critical to a successful result.

Depending on the complexity of your project the requirements document could be a one-page list and some sketches or something much more detailed.

Design and Build

Using the requirements we can start to design and build your solution. We would split the work into logical groupings, and at each step of the way we show you what we've done and ask you to have a go at using it, and to test it (see Testing section below).

This helps you get a feel for what we're doing and makes sure what we build is exactly what you need. It's also better this way if your needs change (or you change your mind about something), so we know earlier and can more easily and cheaply change course.

Some call it Agile, but whatever you call it we find it works really well.

Usability is fundamental to us - we make sure that everything about the solution is clear and concise. It needs to work and make sense to you and your users.

Testing

At each logical grouping of work we test what we've done, then when we're satisfied with it we show it to you and ask you to have a go at using it, and to test it against the relevant requirements.

At the end of the building phase, you then test the whole solution against the requirements and if it meets the requirements we are ready to go live. You should be confident by that stage, since we'd have been doing this bit by bit as we went along.

Support

If you require ongoing support for the solution when it's up and running we'd create a formal support contract.