How we work
The most successful digital projects are born out of close collaboration and communication. And that is how we like to work.
Working with you
We provide excellent access to our Project Lead be it by phone or over a coffee, as and when it might help.
And we believe that regular face-to-face contact is important for any co-design team to function well – and especially to build understanding, in the early stages of a project.
We also work in the open – which means sharing our work with you as we go along, encouraging you (and your stakeholders) to be a part of it.
Be it our (simple to use) online Kanban boards, our user testing sessions, or the emerging and iterating digital product itself.
Our ‘agile’ methodology: Kanban
In our experience, Kanban works superbly for website delivery.
We use Kanban with online tools to support a mix of co-location and remote working, and we track our progress using online tools such as JIRA.
Progress is readily visible to all and clients are encouraged to contribute.
With Kanban, developers ‘pull’ jobs when they are ready to take them on, taking care to limit the number of items of ‘work-in-progress’ (WIP).
We prefer Kanban (for instance to Scrum) as it is more adaptable to the needs of each project and client. It doesn’t have the fixed rituals of Scrum (e.g. daily stand-ups, retrospectives, etc). Instead, our teams use near continual ad-hoc communication (e.g. via Slack and informal meet-ups) to achieve the same aims as the formalised meetings of Scrum.
Our development and deployment set-ups support continuous integration, supported by automated testing. So rather than fixed days for code releases (e.g. once every two weeks), our developers release code when it is ready and / or needed.
That said, we do typically run one aspect of the project in regular cycles, to give the project a recognisable cadence (and make the logistics far easier!): We like to run user research on a fixed cycle, for instance every two weeks. For more on user testing, please see ‘Lean UX’.