Digital Fusion is a service firm: we provide the consulting services you need to develop and sustain a custom built database or web solution. These services are sold on a time incurred basis, and include everything we do from system design and architecture, to software development, deployment and ongoing maintenance.
We use the very practical “Agile” project principles which basically means we work closely with you in an iterative and collaborative fashion throughout the project and tackle features in order of importance to you. Substantial projects have two major phases:
Design and Plan
This stage aims to gather enough information to get a “fairly good” idea of what the system needs to do, enough to set out a staged development plan with a target date to start using the system, and likely investment required to get there. Specifically this means:
- Gather requirements and establish a feature wish-list
- Mockup prototyping of the main screens
- Create a Development Roadmap
The resulting document is not an exhaustive specification for the system, but provides everyone with a clear understanding of what’s needed and a very real sense of how it’ll look and function.
Development Iterations
The building of the database or web application itself is a collaborative process in which we need to meet with you every 1 – 2 weeks, go over what’s been built to get your feedback, and discuss details of the next stage. The advantages of this approach are many-fold:
- You get “What You Want”, through fine tuning and feedback during development
- You’re in Control
- You get to Use the system as soon as you feel there’s enough functionality to be useful
- For us both we get to focus on one area at a time, so it’s easier to get the details right
- Agile project management depends on a consistent commitment from your end to spend regular blocks of time with our developers every week or two. Meetings may be face-to-face at our offices or yours, or remotely using screen-sharing and video conferencing.
This approach provides a great deal of flexibility and works from a basis of incomplete detail which means that the exact functionality of each feature isn’t necessarily defined in advance.
There are several ways to manage this depending on your priorities, for example if budget or timeline is the priority then as development proceeds each week features and ideas may get postponed for future work if they can’t be fitted in; conversely the timeline and budget may get extended if you find the need to refine or make a feature more sophisticated than the initial plans.
In some cases the timeline and cost can be reduced because client’s find that they’ve “got enough” when they start using the system and find some of things they initially thought would be essential aren’t actually needed. Either way, you’re in control and can make decisions on specific issues as they arise while still having the big picture in mind.
Although Agile methods require flexibility you can work to a fixed budget or fixed rate of expenditure (e.g. per month), while ensuring that overall objectives are met. This is achieved by being flexible about the complexity and extent of features that are implemented.
