Client Onboarding Documents

Scoping & Quality Assurance

Handover & Client Testing

Flexible logic and scope extensions

Bugs & issues

Our Prioritisation Logic

Explore

Development Services

Agile Development

Our approach to successfully managing the development of complex systems.

Welcome

Hi! We’re looking forward to working with you to automate your business processes and help you to unlock valuable time and skill to work on more strategic issues and opportunities.

We have discussed the development of your systems and workflows with an agile approach . This document provides an overview of what it is, how it’ll work and the tools involved.

In the email that sent you here, there is also a link to our engagement form to get started. If you like what you have seen, that is the next step.

Agreement

Contract Type

Agile

Description

After our initial discovery call, we will have established your goals and discussed an angle of attack based on what we collectively know so far. So we will get started on the most critical pieces and build in small ‘chunks’ to allow you to feed back and shape the outcome bit-by-bit. Any feature requests that come to you as we go, will be queued in a dedicated list that you will be able to view online (along with live status of work in progress). We’ll come to you for feedback often before moving ahead.

Rate

We measure agile projects in sprints, which usually take place over one working week and consist of about 24 hours of effort blended across the disciplines (consulting, development, operations) involved in your project.

Our standard blended development rate per sprint equates to a 10% discount on our adhoc rate, billed upfront, excluding VAT at the required rate (according to your locality and any applicable cross-border taxation laws). When completing your engagement form, you may choose your preferred payment currency from: GBP, USD, EUR and your bills will be converted into your desired currency at the midmarket rate at the time of invoice creation.

Clients on a Workflow Monitoring & Support plan or one of our retained service plans unlock discounted sprint rates outside of any development effort included in their service plan. Please enquire for further information.

Requirements Specification

Project Scoping

Even though neither party may see the ‘whole’ system in its mature state, we shall always define and agree on what is to be built in your next sprint before commencing any technical work. Our developers develop against a set of deliverables grouped by modules making up your system. Scoping work can be completed by your team (if you have bandwidth and capability) as long as it meets our specified standard - linked to below.

Scope Change

Things ALWAYS change. We do not attempt to lock down the scope and requirements for your whole system, but just the parts of your system that are required first or next. We can add as many modules and features as you want to a future development queue, and you can prioritise these as being next on the build list with your PM once we’ve kicked off. If you need to change something in the current sprint, we will pause and rescope as required.

Feedback & QA

The speed of development with nocode and lowcode technologies is blistering: Days and not months vs traditional coded stacks.

Clients are responsible for providing critical feedback “little and often” during the process. If a next step depends on an earlier step to be signed off by you - we’ll need to pause the project until we have that. This can lead to delays against estimated deadlines.

Check out our approach to scoping and some rationale below:

⁠

✅ Project Scoping & Quality Assurance

⁠

Master Services Agreement

All of our engagements are governed by our

Master Services Agreement

⁠

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Methodology

Here’s Alistair Wilson, Managing Director of Compound explaining how we provide agile services to clients. Please note that our operations team is expanding and we are in the process of overhauling our exact systems and processes - but the principles remain the same!

⁠

Relevant Contacts

Role

Name

Telephone

Project Lead

Chinaza

–

⁠

projects@compound.uk.com

⁠

Senior Developer

Daniel

–

⁠

d.wilson@compound.uk.com

⁠

Support & Helpdesk

Irena

–

⁠

help@compound.uk.com

⁠

Billing & Escalation Point

Alistair

07905607661

⁠

a.wilson@compound.uk.com

⁠

There are no rows in this table

⁠

Project Stack

Project Whiteboard

Diagrams are really helpful when it comes to depicting how a system should work which is why the System Schematic is requirement within our specification standard. This facilitates conversations and ultimately understanding and agreement on system logic.

Miro is our default whiteboard app. If we need to dive into the detail about how a certain module will work, or iron out a given workflow - this is where we will collaboratively diagram it out.

We’ll use a single infinite canvas with multiple areas for different aspects of your project. Your link to your whiteboard will be shared with you upon kick-off.

Action Management & Dependencies

We track project development activity in ClickUp. We will provide you with an overview of all scoped modules and deliverables within your project so you can see real-time progress.

You will also have a dedicated view of any deliverable or actionable task awaiting an action by one of your stakeholders.

We try and keep this space clean and tidy with maximum pragmatism. If you would like to discuss any of the contents on this board, you can raise it with your primary contact at any point.

Documentation

Whatever written documentation is required, we will produce and share in

Coda⁠

as part of our handoff procedure. This is what Google Docs should have been building and we promise you’ll love it,

if you give it a try⁠

Video documentation. Why tell you what to do when we could show you? That’s why we use Loom. Once you’ve

made and shared your first Loom⁠

, we think you’ll never go back!

Communication

We find that small and frequent asynchronous communications usually cover 80% of the understanding requirement for agile projects, but we will book in sync meetings to cover off open questions and any other issues blocking progress. You may also request meetings as required.

Principles

Sync vs Async communications

Asynchronous communications are important for distributed teams working across timezones to facilitate consistent progress toward your objectives. As a rule of thumb, we will default to this mode for our everyday interactions, but where an interaction requires two or three back and forth responses - we synchronise via a video or voice call.

Synchronous: For all engagements other than ad hoc, we will agree on a routine of weekly or fortnightly sync calls to check in with each other and to maintain alignment on your highest priorities.

Prefer High Bandwidth

We encourage the use of higher fidelity media for communications, and recognise text-based comms is the lowest form - but sometimes convenient. Therefore, instead of writing you a 2,500 word email trying to invoke precise picture of an interface in your mind’s eye - we will record a Loom and send it to you in under 5 minutes flat. We also find it helpful when clients reciprocate that approach!

Pragmatic

We’ll keep our language ‘everyday’ and accessible to the layperson.

We’ll endeavour to understand your business, but may not get the ins and outs of your business logic and everyday dictionary for a while.... so please bear with us and always ‘Explain it Like I’m 5’ when explaining what needs to happen – this is a massive time saver.

Communication Touch Points

Progress Reports

Clients will also receive a weekly or fortnightly update report, highlighting:

Progress made since last report

Blockers including outstanding information awaiting or decisions to be made

Immediate next actions

Sync Meetings

We default to Whereby for synchronous meetings, including our Weekly Sync Meeting

Note: For the purposes of ensuring that we obtain a full understanding of your requirements and decisions we default to RECORDING ALL of our sync calls. This allows our team to go back through to ensure we understand. If doubts are raised, we’ll come back to you for clarification.

Everyday Tactical

We prefer to use Slack over email.

We will create a shared Slack channel involving all of the stakeholders you identify in your engagement form. We welcome the use of voice and video and voice notes here. When using video notes, please also share your screen for context (or, see Loom below!)

For ad hoc tactical chats, we opt for huddles in Slack (which facilitate cross-border calls free of charge).

HF Client Demo / Feedback Requests

Where feedback is requested or a relatively complex question is being asked (preceding a key decision), we will use Loom. This facilitates quick capture of those ideas and questions and normally speeds up the process of establishing understanding.

Sprint Workshops

During a sprint, if we become aware of a risk that can’t be solved by any of the above, one of our preferred approaches to mitigating it will be to call a sprint workshop. This provides a context within which your project stakeholders will join with our technical and consulting team to discuss and resolve the issue.

Infrastructure & Toolset

Backend Solutions

Airtable - Connected app platform and nocode interactive backend

Coda - Internal tools with lower data volume, but highly interactive backend

Xano - Data Intensive applications with custom front-end

Front-end Platforms

Shopify - Ecommerce (also offer frontend dev on Shopify)

Webflow - Data driven CMS sites

WeWeb.io - Interactive web apps

Integration Tools

Make (formerly Integromat)

Zapier

Python/Javascript - where code is required

Frequently integrated apps

eCommerce Platforms

BigCommerce

EKM

Shopify

Webflow

Wordpress + Woocommerce

Accounting

Kashflow

Quickbooks

Sage

Stripe

Xero

Data Operations

CSV, Excel and Sheets

Custom API calls

Data transformation

Working with arrays: JSON, XML

CRM

Hubspot

Pipedrive

Salesforce

MRP / ERP

Katana

Salesforce

Database & Backend

Airtable

Xano

Work OS

ClickUp

Coda

Dropbox

Excel

Google Sheets, Google Drive

Jotform

Monday.com

Slack

Comms

Calendly

Gmail

HubSpot

Outlook

SavvyCal

Slack

Twilio

Zoom

Email Automation

Active Campaign

Autopilot (Orrto)

HubSpot

⁠

Data Privacy & Security

Utility User - All new accounts created will make use of your utility domain user, requested in your engagement form. The purpose of this approach is to isolate any actions taken by an automated system from those taken by people. This enables accurate tracking of the productivity of your automations, keeps a clean audit log for troubleshooting, enhances reliability and security.

An example utility user would be bot@yourdomain.com

1Password - All credentials will be created, maintained and shared within a dedicated password vault. Your project stakeholders will receive guest access to this for the duration of our engagement.

2FA - Where available, two-factor authentication will always be used to maximise protection of your confidential data. This will be handled natively via 1Password. If not available, the utility user email address will be used.

Communication Touch Points

Infrastructure & Toolset

Data Privacy & Security

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.