TECHNOLOGY SERVICE · 02
Custom Software Development
Web platforms, internal tools and operational systems built for the way your organisation actually works. This suits teams whose process has outgrown spreadsheets and licensed products, and who need something their own staff can run for years.
The build-or-buy question, answered honestly
Plenty of requirements are better served by a product you can buy. Our first job is to separate the parts of your workflow that are genuinely yours from the parts that are standard, and to recommend buying the standard parts. What remains is usually smaller than the original brief and considerably more valuable.
That conversation happens before any estimate, because an estimate for the wrong scope is worse than no estimate at all.
Thin slices to production
Delivery runs in two-week increments, each ending with something deployed rather than demonstrated. The first slice usually covers one real workflow end to end for a small group of users, which surfaces the integration and permission problems while they are still cheap to fix.
Progress is reported against working software and open risks, not percentage complete. Scope changes are priced when they arrive, so nobody discovers a budget problem at the end.
- Two-week increments, each deployed to a real environment
- One workflow live for pilot users before breadth is added
- Written change notes whenever scope moves
The code is yours from the first commit
Work happens in your repository under your organisation account, or in ours with a documented transfer at each milestone if you prefer. Intellectual property assigns to you on payment, stated in the contract rather than implied. No part of the delivery depends on a licence only we hold.
Handover is a phase, not an email
Every engagement ends with your team able to run the system without us. That means an architecture note, a local setup that works on a fresh machine, a documented deployment path, and paired sessions with whoever inherits it. Where you would rather we kept running it, that becomes a separate support agreement with defined service levels instead of an informal favour.
What you get
- A scoped backlog with estimates, assumptions and named exclusions
- Source code in your repository, with commit history intact
- Deployed environments for development, staging and production
- Automated test suite running on every pull request
- Architecture note covering data model, integrations and key decisions
- Setup and deployment documentation verified on a clean machine
- Signed IP assignment and, where relevant, an NDA and data processing agreement
- Handover sessions with the engineers who will maintain it
Typical outcomes
8-12 weeks
Typical time to a production release
2 weeks
Increment length, each one deployable
30+
Projects delivered end to end
Stack we use
Questions
Both, and the choice follows the shape of the work. Well-understood scope with a stable specification can be fixed-price; discovery-heavy work is better on a monthly team rate, where you can stop at any month boundary.
You do, assigned on payment and written into the contract. We keep no licence over the delivered work and use no proprietary framework that would force you back to us.
Yes. That is our outstaffing model: engineers embedded under your direction, in your tooling and your ceremonies, billed monthly. Many clients start with a fixed-scope project and then keep one or two engineers on afterwards.
Regularly. The first two weeks are then spent reading, mapping and fixing the build before any feature work, and you get a written assessment of what we found, including anything we think is unsafe to leave alone.
Related
Next step
Start with a 20-minute call.
Tell us the roles you need filled, the system you need built, or both. You will speak to someone who has done the work, and leave the call with a route forward.