Often, the first activity following consultation will be to provide the client with a very rough estimate that we refer to as a Rough Order of Magnitude (or ROM) Estimate.

The purpose of this activity is to ensure that both parties are at least in the same ball park in terms of expectation before moving forward and can often be a great way of highlighting those requirements that may not be a must-have, yet may form a substantial part of the estimate.

There are several research & discovery activities that we may carry out depending on the project. This could be a simple meeting or telephone call to discuss the project requirements or a more in-depth process involving stakeholder interviews, surveys, focus groups and investigation into the clients current infrastructure.

Regardless of the activities, the goal is always the same – for both Hallnet and the client to properly capture all requirements, understand the target audience needs and gain a deeper knowledge of the proposed solution, including any required integration.

We work with the client to break the requirements down into broad features and move these into priority order, leaving the ‘nice to have’ features at the bottom.

Then, we break down the highest priority features into smaller chunks, define each one in much more detail and work out how to go about them, in terms of design, development, testing and deployment. A set of these manageable chunks is then formed into a neat package of work, ready to be picked up by the delivery team.

Of course, there’s much more to any project than just the features. We conduct thorough risk assessments, privacy impact assessments and plan for application security and technology constraints at the outset.

By ‘Iterative Delivery’ we don’t mean anything particularly fancy, simply that we deliver one small piece of work to a test or demo environment before moving onto the next.

Rather than the client having to wait until the end of the process to see the finished product and hope what they had in mind actually works, iterative delivery provides the opportunity to see how things are progressing, test things early and make informed changes as the process goes along – even deciding that some proposed features will no longer be required.

We’ve never come across a single project that hasn’t required some form of scope change, making iterative delivery a highly cost effective option.

Once the first delivery iteration is completed, focus goes back to Planning & Prioritisation, adding and removing requirements, changing priorities, breaking down and defining features and ultimately, creating the next work package.

This process continues until the project is completed.