Working at FoCul
Our Values :
At FoCul we believe very strongly in providing a very competent professional service to our customers.
We also believe in giving our clients the best total value for money and a clear expectation on cost. Our work is often on a fixed price basis.
Our Customers :
Our customers tend to be organisations that we have an ongoing relationship with. They trust us to do a good job and to give best value.
The type of work that we do :
We do a wide range of work from ad-hoc 15 minute help calls ( mostly from administrators or developers rather than users ) through to 40 person day development projects.
We tend to work either individually or as a team of two with one person taking a Project Manager role and the other the lead development role.
The projects cover the whole range of typical Lotus Notes / Domino applications from HR systems through to systems for assessing the safety of chemical storage tanks. They tend to be departmental or site solutions rather than large enterprise solutions ( although we do these too )
Although we do work very closely with client side IT professionals most of our work is directly with end users and business process owners
How we do the work :
As work comes in it is queued and allocated to people. Where possible we try and use the same people on a job from start to finish.
You will generally be involved with specifying the work with the client although in some cases this may be after a Proof of Concept has been completed.
We have a work process with a series of steps to ensure that the work is robust and does what the customer wants. The extent to which this is used will vary between jobs but it is important. The key steps are :
- Specification
Working with the client to understand what their needs really are and to use our knowledge to help them find the best combination of functionality and cost.
Our specification documents would typically be a list of requirements with some examples of the look and feel ( often quoting previous work ). For larger projects we us a project Wiki to capture the specification - Proof of Concept
On some projects we will produce a Proof of Concept system. We do this where we feel that there is an area of technical risk that we need to eliminate or where we feel that we need something tangible to make sure that both the client and ourselves have similar expectations. - Development
We have guidance that developers need to work within. This is based on a customers particular "look and feel", pre-existing modules that we wish to re-use and some simple conventions that we use
There would normally be a brainstorming session between the developer and the project manager ( or another developer ) at the start of the development process
Ideally developers have a dedicated server with their own OU and the ability to create test users etc.. - Developer Testing
All projects have a step where the developer tests their work before taking it to the client. Reservations from this point onwards are raised and tracked in a reservations database. - Internal Testing
On larger projects the project manager or another developer will help test the application before it goes to the client for UAT. All reservations are captured and tracked - User Acceptance Testing
Most work goes through this phase. For large projects it may involve two rounds of testing, for smaller projects it may be a quick phone call.
Where we do two rounds of UAT the first is primarily to confirm that all of the required functionality is in place ( although robustness is important ) while the second is to confirm that the application is totally robust - Support and Enhancements
Our fixed price projects typically include a budget for enhancements so that the client can have changes made. We also work pro-actively with the client to ensure that the application is a success
We do not charge customers to fix our mistakes so it is important that the work is well done and well supported
FoCul does not have traditional offices and only around 10% of our work is done on our customers sites. We can arrange office space but our preferred scheme is to work from home offices.
We use VOIP, Notes and Sametime to create a virtual office environment ( sounds very grand ! ).
Where possible each developer has their own OU and server
Full time roles are required to work fairly set office hours but part time and associate roles can work as flexibly as required as long as the customer receives an excellent service