Most of our competitors have pretty (and some not so pretty) diagrams on their websites—showing planning, analysis design, implementation and maintenance boxes connected by arrows in a circle of some sort. It usually looks something like this:
Benefit: Better communication
Single point of contact—It’s a shame that most development companies don’t have a single-point-of-contact ethos from pitch to support. If you were impressed by the way a salesman talked your language, understood your project intimately and asked all the right questions but then handed you over to a project manager, surely the value is instantly lost?
We like to keep things simple. We’ll give you one single point of contact through the life of a project from pitch to support.
Talking your language—It doesn’t matter if you’re an ideas person or a technical guru, we can talk on your level. We will translate your raw idea into a technical reality or take technical instructions and implement them precisely. Regardless of your experience level, we’ll communicate with you accordingly, and in a way that suits you. Email, Skype, in person—however you prefer.
We have various tools at our disposal that will keep you in the loop. If you’re non-technical, phone calls, e-mails and face-to-face meetings will usually suffice. If, however, you’re highly technical you will most likely want access to an online issue tracking system and exchange information in a more technical way.
Benefit: Greater value for money through Agile development practices
More formal, “high ceremony” projects require tight specifications, efficient scope control and change management procedures. The aim of the game here is to build a specified project within the time and budget allocated. Perhaps you are an organization where all processes are established and rarely changed and you can define your requirements upfront. That’s fine—we can approach your project in a more formal, structured fashion.
However more and more companies release that building bespoke software for their business is a learning process. New requirements can emerge during the project as a result of changing business climate, or because of lessons learned from using first release of a system. If you appreciate a more ‘hands on’ approach with working systems, then you need a more flexible approach. That approach incorporates Agile development practices.
The principal of Agile approach is simple: you learn a great deal when moving towards your goal. Frequent adjustments based on the lessons learnt will lead to a better overall product or service.
Benefit: Sustainable project development
Standards—Adopting the same design patterns and coding standards in every project independent of the platform or programming language used assures low technical debt, and ability to scale resources quickly.
Forward thinking—Each stage of the project is treated as an independent part with finalised deliverables. So if you decide to move project to another team (including in-house) or hold fire with the work, you still have a strong-base from which to build-on in the future.
Rotation—Moving people around the code base. Instead of one person who knows everything about a given section of code, everyone on the team knows much of the code in each section.
Resource flexibility—We maintain our resource utilisation at around 60-70%, meaning that we always have resources available to meet the deadline.
Although we charge higher rates than some of our competitors, our clients benefit in terms of productivity, timeliness, experience, knowledge and attitude.
Benefit: High productivity
We work in small teams of highly productive professionals. All our developers are capable of multitasking and adopting different roles in a project. Team leads are not only very experienced software developers, but also skilled communicators, analysts and system architects. Programmers are self-sufficient and self-motivated and they contribute not only by writing code but also by actively seeking technical solutions to client problems.
We hire only top talent—It is a well known fact that the productivity of developers can differ by the factor of 10. We only employ top-class specialists. All have academic backgrounds, some also have advanced degrees and teach at Universities.. New employees work only on internal projects for at least a year, learning our approach and development methodologies.
We value motivation and positive personality—When recruiting new talent we concentrate on personal qualities as well as technical skills. Loyalty, motivation and the desire to work in a team are all key competencies for us.
We have very low staff turnover—How? A relaxed working environment and higher than market rates of pay certainly help.
Also read about principles we follow in our work or contact us to discuss your project!