Support and Development requests break up into three categories, each carrying different priorities, timelines and expectations for how they may be addressed.
Production
- Production means your 'live' applications, 'business-as-usual', as they were defined at commencement or since the last development was deployed
- Your expectations are that your applications are online, functioning as per defined requirements, and performing to the speed at which they were tested when deployed
- Should you have a problem e.g. a feature not working as expected, you may raise a support ticket (marked urgent if mission critical)
- We will respond and if high/urgent priority escalate resources to resolve as soon as possible (see SLA below for a guide to response times)
- Our Commitment - your applications' functionality wil be restored as soon as possible to working order as specified in service agreements, or development specifications,
Development
- Develop means to add, build or enhance features of your application to a defined specification
- This assumes all the requirements are 'known' and specified, and we have an agreed budget
- The may be a need for contingency but this is usually only if there are a few 'unknowns' (if extensive, see Discovery)
- Our Commitment - to deliver your application developments on time and on budget
Discovery
- Discovery means exploration of new ideas, features, possibilities for which the exact specifications or impact are not fully known by you or us
- For example, you've heard of a feature or seen something on a competitors site that you think might work
- As we don't know the specifications, we don't know the resource requirement for you to know what the budget requirements might be
- So the project becomes an exercise in research and testing in order for us all to become more informed as to the viability and effectiveness of the feature
- This may be at our cost or your cost depending on whether the benefit is to everyone on the Audienceware platform, or bespoke to your application
- Our commitment - to invest time and resource to assess how the features may work, the development effort required, and time permitting to conduct a demonstration