The goal of Vermont Creative Technologies is to provide its clients with robust, easy to use solutions to their technological needs.
This is accomplished by:
- Taking the time to fully understand the clients needs.
- Design a flexible solution. flexibility designed in, because one truth of development, as projects develop so do the projects needs.
- Bring together the resources necessary to complete the project.
- Embracing change, that ensures client satisfaction, which at the end of the day is what it is all about.
Approach to design
Design through simplicity, something that is taught in engineering but often forgotten. Break a project down into manageable pieces, organize the pieces and build to the end result one piece at a time. Another truth of development, if one piece of the puzzle seems to complex it hasn’t been broken down far enough yet.
Approach to our clients
We bring our clients with us along the road. All to often developers are called in, go off on their own for a number of months and come back and say “here it is, isn’t it great”. Then more often that not clients end up saying, “that is a really nice product but not at all what I had in mind”. By including the client each step of the way we ensure that scenario wont happen. The client always fully understands what we are doing and why. They are given the opportunity to correct the path and make changes at any point along the way. In most cases the changes are minor and will just happen. In those few cases where they are major, i.e. will effect the schedule, costs etc. the effects are presented to the client and the client can make to decision whether it is important enough to add now or wait for a future revision.
Approach to project management
We use Microsoft project to manage all aspects of most projects, those taking more than a month to complete. Each part of the project break down described in our approach to design is loaded into project. An estimate for the amount of time it will take to complete that piece will be assigned. The times will be totaled producing an estimate for the total project.
Milestones & Status Reports
Milestones are assigned, milestones are very important for a number of reasons. Primarily all development stops at milestones, a deliverable is produced and the complete project can be assessed to ensure it is on track. This is one of the ways we ensure we do not get to far if a correction is needed. In addition to milestones weekly status reports are created including what was accomplished in the previous week, goals for the following week and general development status. The main difference between the status reports and milestones, typically development not stopped.
Time Management
Each project is assigned a unique id within our time management system. That is further broken down into a service item and class of work. Total time is used to update the project timeline and both are reported in weekly status reports. A detailed report is created at milestones and at the end of the project giving an overview. The following link is to a typical project summary report Project Time Overview.