At Contact Media we pride ourselves on our professionalism as well as our creative skills and work ethic.

All of our customer engagements follow a consistent, proven process designed to ensure that we have a shared understanding of your requirement and deliver the most cost effective solution, in the least possible time, whilst ensuring you are kept informed of progress every step of the way.

Initial Enquiry

The process starts with the first contact by the customer, when your enquiry and contact details are recorded in our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  This information is shared by the Contact Media team and ensures all future communications are informed with subsequent communications between us and yourself being recorded in this system.

During the initial conversation an outline of the requirement is recorded and a date is typically set for an initial consultation, where one or more of Contact Media team will either visit you or receive you at our offices in Stockport, to discuss your requirement in detail.

Details of the proposed meeting are emailed to you to confirm our understanding.

Initial Consultation

During the initial consultation we look to determine the ‘scope’ of the project (i.e. what’s in and what’s out) and to record the particulars of your requirement.  During the session it is not unusual for us to use previous examples of our work and possibly ‘mockups’ from the initial enquiry, to shape our conversation.

Although technologies, timescales and costs may be discussed during the meeting, these will typically be our initial thoughts and estimates at this stage and is only when the team have had chance to consider the requirement in detail will a firm cost and timescales be established as part of the ‘Project Brief’.

The Project Brief

This document serves as a written record of the initial consultation and details your requirement in words and pictures and looks to establish the scope (i.e. boundaries) of the project.  The document is also more than a simple statement of requirements and it details the architecture and design of the proposed solution, along with costs, the payment profile, timescales in the form of a plan, as well as success criteria, which will form the basis of internal and acceptance test criteria.  In short the document serves as a comprehensive proposal.

This forms the basis of the engagement and as such you as the customer are asked to sign of the ‘Project Brief’.

Implementation

Once the ‘Project Brief’ has been agreed work begins on the project.  At Contact Media we tend to follow a modular approach to work, splitting the project into discreet tasks, which form part of a larger solution but allow progress on the project to be easily tracked.

All materials and code relating to the project are held on our projects drive which is securely backed up and we employ a source control system, to effectively safeguard versions of particular files from being accidentally overwritten, forcing our developers to ‘check in’ and ‘check out’ work with supporting commentary.  This enables a larger team to work in tandem on a project without resulting in unnecessary rework.

Work is initially undertaken on the Contact Media development area, where all coding and subsequent internal testing is undertaken.

Once the work has successfully passed internal testing it is promoted to the test environment as a logical unit or ‘release’, which is handled by our source control and build system and it is here that you, the customer, first have visibility of the solution and are able to conduct your own tests.

Should rework be necessary due to testing errors, the changes are made on development, subjected to further internal tests before being released again for you to test.

Once the release has been approved it can then be released to your production/live environment.

Through out the whole of the implementation phase your assigned account manager will look to keep you informed of progress by means of a written weekly progress report, summarizing progress to the agreed plan, work undertaken during the period, work to be undertaken during the next period and any issues for management attention.

That said should more pressing matters arise your assigned account manager will contact you by phone or email, with email always being used to serve as a record of any decisions that have been made.

Changes to the scope of the project once the ‘Project Brief’ has been agreed, are subject to strict change control and the change is documented, a solution is derived and the implications for the current project are considered, chiefly cost and timescale implications. 

Where changes need to be introduced as part of the current project rather than being considered as part of a later phase or project, the change results in a revision to the Project Brief which must be approved and signed by you. 

During the implementation phase further activities may also be undertaken, for larger projects this may involve the production of technical and end user documentation as well as training courses.  These vary from project to project and are typically set out in the Project Brief.

Project Conclusion

At the end of the project when the solution has been put in place a conversation or meeting (depending on the size of the engagement) is typically held to review the project to look at what lessons can be learned from the exercise to improve our process and future engagements.