Our Process
All the new systems we develop, should provide immediate business benefits by efficiently providing a structured repository for important business information to assist the functioning of the organisation and in managing it’s business.
Costs are usually one-off costs for analysis, design and development, with a modest annual fee for hosting and unlimited support, which means the organisation will not bear large on-going costs for a tailored system, even though the system should provide ongoing benefits over time.
The development methodology underlying our projects is based on the Agile methodology as distinct from the Waterfall methodology. One of the key differences between Agile and Waterfall is that Waterfall requires extensive planning and analysis of requirements before commencement of development and is not typically accommodating of changes to the specification until the full system is developed. In contrast, Agile prioritises requirements and focuses on analysing detail in a modular, incremental fashion, just to the extent required to develop each module in in turn. It is important that you understand the methodology so that you will be aware of the style and approach used in development and that your expectations are correctly matched.
Each development cycle generally progresses through three phases, as shown below.
Learning Phase
During this phase, we are gaining an in-depth understanding of the processes and workflows of your organisation. Who does what, when they do it, how they do it, and WHY they do it. As business consultants with extenisve experience, we challenge existing processes to indentify and discuss the most efficient way to achieve the aims of the business. We don't want to simply 'systemize' how you work today, we want to help streamline the business to prepare for the ever changing world we live in.
Although we are learing about your business and the team/users, we are also shedding light on HOW we could improve the way you work, and often, clients find this phase both stimulating and revealing, as they learn more about what's possibly and realistic with technology today - often far more than you realised!
Building Phase
Based on the analysis and information determine from the Learning phase, we commence design and development, or the Building phase. Often the development itself consists of multiple strands as we need to develop the interface, database, back-end code, front-end code, business control logic, etc. Suffice to say, that we use at least 5 different industry standard programming languages to design and develop most systems, and sometimes, several others too, with each language being used to achieve specific aspects of the functionality required in a flexible and efficient way.
We like to provide regular demos to you whilst we're building, so you can see how it's progressing and provide valuable feedback. This is how we guarantee the system should meet your needs when going live and you don't get a shock to find the system is NOT what you expected because you only see the system very late in the project, as is sometimes the case with other methodologies.
Go Live Phase
By the time you're ready to go live, wehther in incremental phases or in total, you will have seen, tested and checked the system to the point that you will feel comfortable that it WILL achieve your needs.
Having said that, we recognise that it is only WHEN you start using a new system in earnest, that you start to notice little tweaks and changes that you didn't quite envisage during the design and build stage. This is normal and expected human behaviour, and we can tweak and adapt the system to ensure it's optimised for your needs.