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How we work
The same five stages apply to a two-week website and a twelve-month managed service agreement. At any point you should be able to say which stage you are in, and what has to be true before the next one starts.
Understand the problem before quoting a solution
We establish what is actually being solved, what already exists, who is affected, and what success would look like in terms you can measure. This usually takes one or two conversations and costs nothing.
Where an existing product would solve the problem more cheaply than anything we could build, we say so. Where the work should not proceed at all, we say that too. Discovering it at this stage costs a conversation; discovering it three months in costs a project.
Put the whole thing in writing
A statement of work naming deliverables, exclusions, acceptance criteria, price, payment schedule and assumptions. Exclusions get the same care as inclusions, because almost every dispute in this industry traces back to something both parties assumed and neither wrote down.
Acceptance criteria are written so that finished is a matter of fact rather than opinion. If a criterion cannot be tested, it is rewritten until it can be.
Deliver in increments you can review
Work lands in reviewable pieces against a shared environment, not as a single reveal at the end. You see progress while there is still time and budget to change direction.
Changes to agreed scope are quoted before they are done. Absorbing them silently ends either in a bad month for us or an unexpected invoice for you, and neither is a sound basis for continuing to work together.
Test against the criteria we agreed
Quality and delivery checklists are run against the acceptance criteria set in stage two, and the results are shared with you in full, including the items that did not pass.
Where something falls short you hear it from us rather than finding it yourself later. A defect reported is a task; a defect discovered by the customer is a credibility problem.
Leave you able to operate it without us
Documentation written for whoever will maintain the system, credentials in accounts you own, and a walkthrough with the people who will use it.
Intellectual property in everything we create transfers to you on final payment. Domains, repositories, tenancies and licences are in your name from the start, so there is nothing to negotiate at the end and nothing that stops working if you engage somebody else.
Terms we hold ourselves to
These are contractual rather than aspirational, and they appear in the agreement you sign.
- Fixed scope agreed in writing before work starts, with exclusions stated.
- Changes quoted in advance, never absorbed silently and invoiced afterwards.
- Intellectual property transferred to you on final payment.
- Accounts, domains and repositories created in your name, not ours.
- Test results shared in full, including what did not pass.
- Thirty days of defect correction after go-live at no charge.