How We Work: Our Development Process

Who You’ll Work With

Every new client starts with one of our Solutions Services Consultants: Rick Middleton, Mark Clark or Laura Vie. They’re technical experts, not salespeople, and they stay on your project team for the life of the engagement. Once you hire us, a project manager and your lead developer join the team. Many of them are partners and owners in the company. Meet the team.

Phase 1 – Free Initial Consultation

We start with the big picture: what your system needs to do, who uses it, what’s broken, your security requirements and what success looks like. We’ll suggest approaches and give you a rough budget and timeline based on similar projects we’ve completed. There’s no charge for this conversation, and you get our honest counsel even if the answer is “you don’t need us for this.”

Phase 2 – The Blueprint (Discovery)

Once you hire us, your project team digs into the details: workflows, users, reports, integrations, and the minor details and big-dream ideas alike. Along the way we’ll point out process improvements that could help your organization. Depending on the size of the project, this phase produces one of three deliverables:

• Agile Design Assessment: a quick summary, generally for support, maintenance and small consulting projects.
• Agile Design Specification: a more detailed summary for medium custom solutions, extensions of an existing solution and integrations.
• Agile Project Proposal: a detailed scope for large, complex projects with integrations or multiple sites.

The blueprint lays out workflows, a revised timeline, wireframes, reporting requirements and an estimate of hours for development, testing, refinement and deployment.

Phase 3 – Agile Development

We build in short cycles: build, deliver, test, get your feedback, revise, repeat. You get working “works-in-progress” to try, with a summary of what’s done, our questions and what’s coming next. Early builds won’t be pretty; we get the functionality and your processes right first, then polish. Because we work agile, we can adjust when a better idea shows up mid-stream, and you control the pace and direction.

Phase 4 – Deployment and Go-Live

Go-live is when your whole team starts using the solution and real-world feedback rolls in. We install, run user testing, and fine-tune until it’s working the way your business does. Then your business life gets easier, and you’ll start thinking of new reports and features you want. We’ll be there for those, and for the occasional gremlin.

Phase 5 – Ongoing Support

Most clients keep us on for support and maintenance: fixes, updates, enhancements and platform upgrades, billed from the same prepaid time blocks. See how we charge.

You Own What We Build

You retain all rights and ownership of everything we build: your solution, your code, your data and your hosting arrangement. More in our FAQ.

How We Communicate

Engagements run remotely by phone, video calls and Basecamp, our shared project management system, where your questions, feedback, files and to-dos live alongside ours. You always know where your project stands.

How Our Time Is Spent in Each Phase

These are rough guides and will shift with your project’s needs.

Expect the Unexpected (in a Good Way)

Custom work, and especially fix-and-repair work, often holds more than meets the eye. Something that looks minor can turn out to be a real hurdle, and solving it sometimes leads to a better long-term solution than anyone first imagined. Our process is built to handle that openly, with you, rather than hiding it in a padded quote.