How We Do It

Having decided that you want DSC to help with your project, how does the process actually work? What does a typical project look like?

It all starts when you contact DSC. We'll listen to an outline of your requirements and tell you straight away if DSC are a good fit for your project. We do turn some customers away if we feel we can't deliver a first class solution; if we can we'll recommend someone else.

We'll ask some questions to gauge not only the technical nature of your needs, but also how you see things proceeding. Different customers have different needs and a single rigid approach doesn't feet all circumstances. Some projects might need a detailed written "set in stone" specification, but that's clearly not appropriate for a smaller project, or one where the true requirements haven't yet been decided upon. In response to these questions we'll propose the next steps.

Typically you'd provide some additional information at this point; anything you have that's relevant to the project. We'll ask for what we need. It's around this time that we'll be able to give you an idea of the costs involved. We sometimes work to a fixed price, sometimes it's time-based and on other occasions some combination of the two. It all depends on the project and what suits you. Obviously with a fixed price we need more detail about exactly what you expect us to deliver.

We'd almost certainly meet to discuss your requirements in more detail -- certainly for a larger scale project.

Next we'd draw up a letter of understanding. In smaller projects this forgoes the need for a contract. For more in depth, high value projects, we'd provide a contract for the work, or you can provide us with one if you have a standard contract that you require your suppliers to use. Again, we can be flexible. For fixed price development work we provide a detailed list of what we're going to do for you.

Once work starts things will move forward very quickly. One of the keys behind our success is that we provide lots of feedback as to how things are progressing. We'll frequently ask you to look at the work in progress. In this way we can both be confident we're on the right track. You'll have access to an online tracking system which allows you to provide information in a useful, structured and secure manner. We have lots of milestones on all but the simplest of projects.

We use a "divide and conquer" strategy, breaking complex systems in to a series of much simpler elements. This has a number of advantages. It allows us to have easily identifiable milestones. It also means that typically you can start to derive benefit from the work we've be doing for you sooner rather than later. In a large project it can significantly reduce development risk.