The 1 Day Project
Recently, we have been building a number of 1 Day Projects for our clients. These kind of projects are often built for one of two reasons:
- To prove a potentially risky concept, or
- To build a simple application
Risky Concepts
Do you have an idea that you need to test? Perhaps using an unfamiliar technology, or process. Let us build you a working prototype with a 1 Day Project.
Examples:
- Plotting locations on a Google Map
- Using the Twitter API
- Receiving credit-card payments
- Connecting to a 3rd-party system
- Trialling virtualisation
- Proving a connection to LDAP or ActiveDirectory
Simple Applications
You may have a manual process that could be more effective as an online application. We've built quite a few replacement spreadsheets using Ruby on Rails.
Examples:
- Employee Directory (previously was an Excel spreadsheet)
- Customer newsletter (email) using Google Spreadsheet based mail merge
- Log file analyser with charts
- Online address book
How it works
One Day Projects are built in a agile manner:
- We meet with you first thing in the morning, and discuss the plan for the day
- We then get started on the initial build
- Due to the extremely agile nature of these projects, we will need to be based onsite with your staff
- As the day proceeds, we will be continuously getting your feedback on the content and scope of the project. This will often include demoing, and trialling different approaches.
- Towards the end of the day, we will deploy your prototype application to staging server, where we will host it temporarily
What are the costs?
These projects are charged on a simple time and materials basis.
For projects where you are testing a risky concept, you may decide to stop the project early. No problem.
After the project finishes
This is up to you - no strings attached. We will email you the source code, and any other files generated during the day's activities. You could then choose to:
Deploy it: the application may be good enough for your needs. You can deploy it to your own servers, or it could be hosted at our data centre. We can also suggest other options.
Enhance it: you could spend another day or so polishing the application. Perhaps it needs a little more functionality, or perhaps some attention from a designer. We would be happy to help with this, or you could use some of your own capabilities.
Commission it: your risky concept may have been proved a success, and you want to use the day's efforts to commence a new project.
Discard it: perhaps your risky concept turned out to be a problem. Congratulations - it only cost you one day to discover this. You can take the learnings from today, and feed them back into your concept. Then test your new approach with another one day project.
Find out more
Feel free to contact us if you want to find out more about 1 day projects. Due to their short nature, we can normally schedule these at reasonably late notice.