Our Process

Whether you’re large or small, blue-chip or not-for-profit; we’ll deliver your software project quickly, efficiently and on-budget

Keeping Things Simple

There’s nothing worse than embarking on your project only to find, halfway through, that what you thought you were getting isn’t quite what you are actually getting. That’s why, with TCF Software we can gurantee that:

All Intellectual Property (IP) rights are yours

You won’t have to pay any license fees and there are no mandatory on-going charges.

Intellectual Property Rights?

We do not outsource any development work

All work is delivered by our in-house team of experts to ensure we have absolute control over communication, development techniques and quality.

We won’t make you reliant on us

All the code we develop for you is produced without the use of proprietary plug-ins, meaning that any professional developer can pick up and work with the code.

We’ll keep you informed

We’ll let you know immediately if we see something going “out of bounds” for whatever reason – for example, changing requirements or slipping dates – so we can openly discuss how to proceed.

So How Will My Project Work?

Customers often ask how their project will work. While it’s certainly not a case of ‘one size fits all’ as everyone’s needs are different; but we typically work through the following steps with our customers:

Let us know your needs

We’ll start by gaining a detailed understanding about your business, existing processes, challenges, ambitions and your vision of the ideal solution. We’ll listen, ask questions, provide ideas and constructively challenge you before establishing an outline strategy and feature-set for the solution that will best meet your needs

Project Proposal

With the knowledge we have acquired from our discussions, we then prepare and present you with a formal proposal document. It sets out how we will work with you, along with information on the feature set for the planned system. It also includes estimated costings and timescales in line with our agreed terms of engagement.

Planning

Following the go-ahead from you to proceed, we start the planning stage, which may include things like building wire-frames and storyboards of your application and an initial outline of any database requirements, plus any technical suggestions.

Our Pricing Models

Once the design stage is approved there are two commercial models under which we can engage:

Agile (Scrum)

The first is Agile (Scrum), which is where we work in efficient 2-4 week sprints to develop the software in an iterative way so you can monitor progress and give us feedback at the earliest point This is ideal if you are keen to get the software completed in as short a timescale as possible, are prepared to pay on a discounted time-basis and/or if the project scope is difficult to define entirely up-front. Projects greater than £25K in total cost are generally more suited to Agile.

Fixed Price

The second commercial model is Fixed Price. These types of projects are suitable for projects where we can fully understand and agree the exact functional and technical requirement before any coding is done or for more off the shelf solutions. This is suitable for smaller projects (less than £25K in total cost) and where a precise specification can be agreed before any development work commences.

We are happy to approach both products fully defined up front or not but if not fully defined then it is generally best for everyone to go down a time-basis route although we will attempt to give a rough time-estimate which we can revise at the end of each sprint as the detail becomes clearer.

Delivery and Testing

As we said we generally work in 2-4 week delivery sprints and we hand over each delivery for you to test and comment on.

This user acceptance testing (UAT) is done on a system separate to the live system, so you can test features and provide any feedback on bugs or issues in a pseudo-live environment. UAT is invaluable to ensure the robustness of the system in the hands of the people that will be using it day-to-day.

We use the state of the art project management platform, Jira, to both manage the project and to give you a platform to let us know of any issues so all issues are properly recorded. We are always on the end of a phone, email or Skype but using Jira means nothing gets lost and nothing get's forgotten.

Training

Our systems are developed to be intuitive for the user, so the need for formal training is significantly reduced. However, if required, we are happy to offer full training options on request and we can also produce full video training that you can refer to over and over.

Post Delivery Support

We’ll provide comprehensive support for your new software in the form of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which is activated on launch of the system and includes: