Clients #

In this section of the handbook you can find out all you need to know about how we manage our client work and the different tools and approaches we take. As with the whole of this handbook, this is a work in progress document that is constantly evolving. This section in particular, as it is the bread and butter of the organisation, and we are always reflecting on our work with clients, the impact we are having, how to best give them value for money, and taking onboard their feedback.

How we organise our work #

With any work we do, we try to organise tasks into epics, which are manageable chunks of work that contribute to a specific business objective. You can read more about what we mean by an epic, what the epic process is and tips on how to best define an epic.

With the majority of our clients we work on a proposal basis, which means we create regular proposals for them that plan out the work ahead for the next six months or so (organised by epics and the order we will do them in). This helps to ensure our work with them is strategic and contributes towards their larger mission. The proposal process we follow is different depending on if it’s an existing client or a new client.

At the end of a project, we carry out an audit to measure the impact we’ve had, and any lessons learned.

Clients we might not take a proposal approach with are ones with smaller budgets who prefer to be in Support and Maintenance mode. You can see a full list of our clients and the approach we take with them in our Client Overview spreadsheet.

Proposals also allow us to agree budgets with clients, as epics all have estimates against them. Of course, estimates are just our best guess and sometimes we get it wrong, however we try to be as accurate as we can by following a process and most importantly, manage our clients' expectations when we can’t.

To minimise uncertainty when doing our estimates, we try to use technology we are familiar with and have a technology stack - a list of our preferred tools - which is what we recommend to our clients. If the client wants us to use technology that is outside of this list, we need to add a buffer into the estimate to allow for more discovery work and uncertainty.

In order to manage our work across the team we have a pipeline that gives us an overview of all our planned work - epic commitments we have made with clients as well as non-billable projects we are working on - and compares this to our available capacity as a team. Some work we do affect all clients and we may proportion time spent on this work across clients. Read more about our client-wide approach.

We also have a set of roles in a project, which typically include a project manager, a developer, an implementer and designer. Depending on the size of the project, there may also be ‘deputies’ of these roles to support the leads, equally if the project is smaller, one team member may fulfil more than one role. Although all roles are important, good project management is the key to the success of a project, as apart from effective planning, managment and reviewing of our work, the project manager is the key contact between us and the client, and is in charge of managing the client's expectations and liasing with them on any budgetary issues.

In addition to project work, we also perform support and maintenance tasks for clients, such as doing regular upgrades. Tracking any code overrides we’ve done is important, to avoid complications during the upgrade, so we also have a process for this.