Agreeing the Vision
Before any actual development starts you need to know that we understand what you expect. We will spend time with you to derive a list of system objectives and the strategies to achieve them. Once we have enough information we will prepare a summary. It will contain both of our understanding of your requirements and a high level draft of the solution design. This document is commonly called a Functional Specification. We will always ensure that this document is written in your language - in terms which the business understands - rather than in geek-speak which only a programmer could comprehend.
We will generally do a portion of this work on a “no foal, no fee” basis. If you give the project the green light - we will recover this time in the overall project cost. We want you to be “free to explore” the ways in which we can help each other do business together. We need you to be able to be open and honest about the entire vision which you are looking to accomplish and not be worrying unduly (yet) about what it is going to cost to write or when it might be completed. This is not to say that this professional work is not chargeable (at some point) but we are certainly prepared to match your commitment to exploring possibilities without having the clock running.
In general we will both get to a point where we have sufficient confidence that we know enough and decisions have been reached and we are ready to start committing much of the idea to paper. We do not need you to draft requirements documents or business case or cost benefit analysis. It is our role to prepare the Functional Specification, including us writing the both the requirements and the description of the key functions (sometimes called Use Cases). That way, when you review what we have written you can clearly see whether we have understood, what gaps we have not identified and whether we are (mutually) ready to progress to estimating and scheduling.
So wherever possible, we would like to spend some extra time up-front with you getting the idea right and agreeing the work beforehand so that we are working together to a shared plan with a clear objective.
