Developed over the course of 20+ years, our Flex6™ process is designed to deliver projects on time and on budget all the while creating meaningful and positive relationships with project stakeholders.
01. Project 5™
As in every human venture, the project can only succeed with the right players. We start all engagements with an initial conversation to go over the 5 key elements of your project: success definition, constraints, expertise needed, timeframe and funding. This helps determine if we are the right partner or if we can refer you to a group that will be a better fit.
Schedule your complimentary Project 5™ meeting >
Strategic Insights
Technology is merely a mean to an end, which is why it makes sense to start by reviewing where we want to go (and why) first, and work backwards from there. The Vision Builder™ Workshop is designed to get all stakeholders on the same page, united in a common vision and ready to row in the same direction.
In a 90 minute session, we explore dangers and opportunities, key outcomes, success criteria, capacity gaps, critical timeline, and budget constraints for the project. We clarify how success will be measured. We discuss how we will collaborate together to make your vision a reality.
Research
If you need to prove your business idea can work and is viable, we can build a simple "proof of concept (POC)" to mitigate the investment risk. The POC can help stakeholders understand the opportunities as well as the limitations of the system.
If you are considering an acquisition, we can conduct a pre-investment review and leverage our industry knowledge to provide some perspective and advice on the technological assets. To this end, we can perform a code review, participate in due diligence conversations, and generally help sort between the hype and the facts.
03. TECHNICAL Planning PHASE
Whether reimplementing an existing system or kicking off a new project, the Technical Plan helps clarify the vision, outline priorities and constraints, and get all stakeholders on the same page.
The Technical Planning phase consists of the following steps:
- Outline desired outcomes, success metric criteria, and constraints
- Define the most appropriate technical approach
- Document the requirements, including such things as user-facing features, expected scalability and reliability, inputs and outputs, authentications, workflows, calculations, data storage, and browser and OS support
- Break the work down in bite size units
- Develop a Complexity Scorecard™ that highlights the complexity of each unit by estimating the difficulty, uncertainty and effort needed to complete the work
- Finalize the scope of work based on cost and priority
- Develop a Project Plan with resources, timeline and budget
The final deliverable is a Game Plan – a comprehensive roadmap that documents the approach, features, functionality, and capabilities of the new system.
04. COLLABORATIVE DEVELOPMENT
Two decades of software development projects have taught us that the following 7 elements are key to ensure projects are on track, and to facilitate support in the long run:
The Right People
- We foster passion by aligning skillset, interests and conative scores with project needs
- We bring in SMEs from other teams when necessary
- We reach out to experts in the tech community if needed
Working Together
- We host daily engineering standups
- We support each other via messages and pair-programming
- We schedule regular design reviews and knowledge transfers
- We engage and support the open-source community
Documenting What's Important
Keeping Everybody in the Know
- We host project reviews (Pit Stops) at regular intervals to correct course if necessary
Using SDLC Best Practices
- We run unit tests in our CI/CD pipelines
And Strong Security Standards
05. DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION
We increase release velocity and reliability through continuous integration and deployment:
06. PROACTIVE SUPPORT
We offer flexible support options that include ongoing as well as emergency assistance. You may mix and match to fit your needs:
Continuous Innovation™
The Continuous Innovation retainer is for organizations who are planning on getting assistance on a regular basis. It is defined as follows:
- We guarantee “x” number of hours to be available to you each month.
- Lead time may be anytime from 1 day to 1 week as we fit the work in our schedule as we go
- Up to one month's worth of hours may roll into the following month.
- Work is to be scheduled during normal business hours
- You can borrow hours from subsequent months.
- Minimum: 30h/month
Emergency Support
The Emergency Support plan guarantees a two-hour response time and offers peace of mind. It includes the possibility to contact Six Feet Up after business hours. The hours are “use-it-or-lose-it”.
On-Demand Support
Flexible and convenient, the On-Demand Support option doesn’t require any commitment but is subject to availability. It is defined as follows:
- ‘Urgent Support’ is for work that requires attention in fewer than 8 business hours
- ‘Scheduled Support’ is for anything that can be handled in more than 8 business hours
The On-Demand Support option comes with the following terms:
- Response time is not guaranteed as access to engineers depends on availability
- Support is billed in one-hour increments.
- Payment in full is required prior to the start of the work.
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