This guide was created to ensure that expectations are met while working through custom developed solutions. The document highlights many of the important aspects required to successfully meet project expectations.

Planning & Scope

For clients wishing to pay for custom development, it is critical that a well thought out scope is developed with your Account Executive (AE). If you are designing the scope with the AE we consider you the project lead for your organization. It is important to provide us with workflow documentation, explanations of the problem you are trying to solve with your custom development and your ideal end result. There are 2 areas you need to consider:

Goals
Requirements

Goals - What are You trying to do?

What is the end goal or specific outcome you want. For example, you may wish to simplify the user experience or issue violations more efficiently. Provide us with as much detail as possible.

Requirements

Clearly, define all the processes you want in a step by step description. The following is a brief example:

Adding a user’s middle initial to their profile
Is this a mandatory field in the profile?
Will all Users be prompted to update their profiles? Will it be on next login?
What if they don’t have a middle initial?
Once instituted will the initial be required on reports? If so which ones?
Will it be required to be populated on violations?
Consider all aspects that the change will affect and address them.

Our development team needs to understand the objectives to design you the best solution. It is not necessary to dictate the solution just to define the end result. Try to assume that you are explaining this to a person that doesn't understand any of the processes and are reading about this for the first time. Your scope documents will be supplied to Development through the Project Manager. You may get questions back that need to be answered before we can proceed. You may also get redirection in the plan so that the solution flows better than originally scoped.

Shared Development

If the custom development requested is deemed to be of enough benefit to other clients, the OPS-COM team may propose a reduced development rate or a shared development plan. In some cases, your account executive will be aware of other clients that may be interested in crowd-sourcing this development.

Testing

Your completed project will be deployed to your preview (testing) environment after internal testing is complete. We expect you to review the project to ensure you are happy with the way it is functioning and give us the OK to deploy it to Production. We expect that you will do the testing within 2 weeks of the deployment to Preview. If your testing takes longer than that, additional charges can be incurred and you may lose your spot in the schedule.

Out of Scope Items

Despite best efforts, sometimes something gets overlooked when scoping the project. These items will be considered Out of Scope and may cost additional time and money. Your Account Executive will work with you to develop new scope around these items and a new quote will be issued for the additional work.

Related Pages

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Custom Development Expectations

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