FAQ

Our Sales Process

Isn’t consulting expensive? You’re right, consulting is an expensive and time-grueling task. But we think every software project deserves a probing, professional evaluation before any work begins. In an industry notorious for low-ball bids, cost overruns, and fluffy proposals we think talking to a team of objective software professionals before you start is not only responsible, but smart.

Trust me – it’s well worth your time and patience to make sure you’re getting exactly what you need. And this just doesn’t mean the software, but also the right team and people.

We have 4 discreet phases in our proven process: Discovery, Design, Develop and Deliver. If this is new software or a new product – we’ll first work with you through our pre-project consulting process to size up your project and then move forward with a Discovery and Design engagement. After D&D, we’ll begin development of your software. You’ll be involved every step of the way. Our seasoned Project Managers are pros in expectation management. They meet with you (and your team) weekly and send out weekly status reports to keep you up-to-date on the project. During our Delivery phase, you can expect your software to get close examination before being handed over to you for user acceptance testing. Our PMs have strong technical backgrounds that make them great at quality assurance and testing. Once your software is “out in the wild” you’ll likely want to do more. Over 90% of our clients want to continue to develop and improve their new baby and are eager to start second engagements.

Our Delivery Process

The typical size for each project team is 2-3 developers. Each project team is supported by UI/UX designers, software testers, project managers, and cloud engineers. With each development team sharing support resources, we’re able to reduce project costs for clients. We’re also able to make developers more efficient by ensuring they spend their time writing production-level code, not inefficiently context switching with other tasks.

Projects fail for one major reason – poor communication. Establishing communication and planning rhythms is the most important aspect of software project management. These rhythms include:

Weekly meeting to review successes, failures, and future plans – 1 hour

Team members demonstrate what they got done the week prior
Everyone discusses how they can improve the processes/techniques on the project
A detailed plan for the upcoming week is agreed to

Daily standup to create team momentum – 15 minutes max

Our project management practices are centered around a “no surprises” philosophy that keeps everyone always informed and attacks risks as they emerge.

Every member of the Clear Launch team is empowered to communicate with our clients. It’s common for phone calls and emails to be exchanged throughout the work week between Clear Launch teams and their clients. Below is a summary of all formal communication methods that will occur throughout the project:

Communication	Purpose
Weekly Status Update	Outline the following: what was worked on last week, what’s happening this week, any questions/issues, status of the project
Weekly Call	This should be a standing call every week that’s scheduled upon kick-off. The purpose to touch base and talk through any issues, get answers to questions, check-up on action items, or gather feedback.
Release Notice	This is an email notice sent by the PM to the Client outlining what’s happened since the last build and what’s ready for testing and feedback.

A typical small team for the projects we work on is two to three full-time developers and a fractional project manager. A large team can be four to six people.

For a rough approximation of project duration, we take the estimates above and divide by 32 hours for each person on the team. For example, a 1200-hour project takes approximately 3 months of calendar time for a team of 3 people (1200 hours / (3 people * 32 hours/person/week) / 4 weeks/month = ~ 3 months).

On large projects, we’re able to add people and go faster. That’s quite an amazing thing, and not something every team or company can do. Growing the team requires we have additional employees available.

When paying for custom software, you should have the mindset of paying a team to design and develop the first instance of a product. Custom software projects are ripe with risk, including building the right product, funding and schedule risks, third-party integrations, and technical approaches that need to be proved out.

Remember, you are paying your team to help you mitigate these risks, not to financially own them. Each sprint or release is not a guarantee of a finished, bug-free product.

However, we do have standards and best practices in place that encourage each team to do their best to build a high-quality product.

We encourage our clients to embrace bugs, embrace risks, and know that we will do everything we can to address both. Your team will track bugs and work them into the schedule each week with other backlog items.

Our teams are smart and experienced; they do their best at predictably building your product. With each iteration, we’ll take what we’ve learned and quickly your team integrate new insights to keep quality high.

Be aware that the financial risk of developing custom software is in your hands. A warranty doesn’t come from your development team, but it’s what you will offer to your customers and employees. Taking on the financial risk is why you have such a potentially significant financial upside.

Yes, we have had a handful of projects fail in our history. In every case, the failure could be attributed to communication issues that included:

Not fully understanding the scope of the project
Misalignment with what was being built versus what was needed
Lack of client and team communication throughout the project

In the event of each failure, we ate the cost of the project until it was back on track. Why? Because we know this was the right thing to do. After taking our lumps, we work to improve our process, continually develop best practices, update engagement playbooks and concentrate on our centers of excellence to be the best at what we do for our clients.

Software is rarely “done.” We know that our clients and their users will continue to have great ideas throughout the process and after the initial delivery. As your business changes, your software may need to evolve and adapt. It’s common after the first release to pause on building features for a bit and focus on enhancements or fixes to drive user adoption. Our project managers are Agile practioners so feature backlogs are reviewed and prioritized in accordance with your budget for any subsequent projects.

Our Customers, Our Capabilities and Our People

You can easily describe Clear Launch clients as:

Non-technical business owners or key people with titles like: CEO, President, COO, Director of Operations, or sometimes Director of Technology or CTO.
Technology-frustrated businesses who are outgrowing their technology/systems/processes or need to improve what they have.
Mostly service-based businesses that see custom software as a competitive advantage
Established small and medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 20 to 400 employees.

The companies we work with come from many different industries: construction and engineering, financial services, consumer packaged goods, education, third-party logistics, real estate, and more. Here are some quick facts about our clients:

The average Clear Launch client has been working with us for over 2 years, on an ongoing basis.
Since 2013, we have worked with xx companies and completed over xx projects.
Over 90% of our clients return for a second engagement.

With hundreds of inquiries a year for new projects, we select new clients and projects carefully. It is important to us that the value we bring will significantly exceed the fees we charge.

There are lots of things to consider when bringing your project to life and we cover them all to ensure you get results.

Strategy – helping you answer the question, “what exactly should I build?”
Design – creating appealing, easy-to-use interfaces that delight your users and make your company look great.
Development – writing and testing code that runs smoothly, gets the job done and is reliable day after day.
Quality Assurance – ensuring that we’re always building the right thing and it works securely across multiple platforms.
Deployment & DevOps – getting your product to your people with minimum hassle.
Hosting & Monitoring – keeping things running smoothly and securely once it’s deployed.
Ongoing Support – keeping your product in top shape and responding to your needs quickly with your own dedicated, fractional software team.

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