Custom Development: the process

1. Initial Meeting Custom software lets you reshape your information systems to either prepare for or react to growth.

• The small business president or workgroup leader may be looking for an opportunity to embody their business practices- and their vision- in the very software that runs the business.

• IT departments facing an integration challenge may be looking for the ability to contract and deploy solutions in months, not years: to actually make headway on a visible project.

2. The Specification Planning a software project brings order to chaos. Yet wisdom teaches that modifying existing software, however necessary, often introduces more chaos. Thus, we approach our clients’ solutions as if we are building them a custom home.

We do all the design and planning work up front, designing the complete software package first, before development begins. We provide our clients with a detailed specification - containing screen-by-screen mockups of their proposed software - along with our estimate.

We ask for a flat fee in advance for this specification, which our clients are then free to have developed elsewhere- even in a platform other than FileMaker Pro. This specification is the most valuable product you’ll receive and this kind of up-front design is what separates the real pros from the people who are just good programmers. Your specification contains all our experience and wisdom applied to your business processes; this is given concrete form in intelligent user-interface mockups, again designed to optimize your business processes. Though you can take the specification elsewhere for final development, we imagine you’ll want this same attention paid to the entire process and will ask us to see the entire project through to the end.

This unique design process offers you three advantages:

• Greater Buy In: We use the design process as a platform for increasing buy in within your organization. This translates into easier project approval and smoother roll out and training down the road.

• A Better Product: Our clients know, in detail, what kind of software they’ll receive. Furthermore, radical changes to the software are easily made during the design process since no code has been written yet. Unlike traditional developers we offer little resistance to radical changes at this stage, as they present no cost in rewriting code.

• Contracts We All Understand: Since the scope of the project is clearly spelled out in our specification, our contracts are not as open ended as those for traditional custom projects. We can all easily come to an agreement as to when the contract has been fulfilled.

3. Development Once the coding is underway, you’ll work with a project manager who understands your needs and oversees the actual developers. Here you have someone trained to ask questions: questions leading to results that are in line with the needs of your organization. You’ll be working with someone who is used to translating our customers’ requests into the directions a programmer needs to best develop the software.

4. Training Training your team is the most critical step in the development process, aside from the actual design. Coding can be easily changed, but once users get frustrated it takes an enormous amount of effort to get them to trust a new system. That is why we often suggest several non-consecutive training sessions to ensure users become comfortable. This approach prevents frustration, reinforces buy-in, and allows users to appreciate the features and merits of their new system.

Training doesn't end once the system is installed and being used. We often provide ongoing training for new users and for users who want take more ownership of their data. We find that users who participate in more regular and redundant training become several orders of magnitude more productive, making it well worth the investment required to get them to that level.

5. Support Support isn’t a complicated issue; however, it is an important one. For many businesses, a vendor’s ability to provide responsive and timely support is their most important selection criteria. We’ve been in business for almost a decade, and some of our customers have been with us since our first year. We continue to meet their needs with the same commitment to quality support we provide to all our customers.

We utilize the best remote access technologies to provide support for our projects, allowing us to make changes and perform training on the fly from almost anywhere in the world. Clients are always astounded the first time we change their software while they are describing their request to us over the phone.