Our process

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Our process

Value at every stage

In developing products and services, Opencast works to a tried-and-tested agile process that helps discover, design and deliver the best solutions for you and your users – backed by continuous testing throughout. We deliver value at every stage of the process, continually developing and evolving products and services with user needs at the core.

Discover, Design, Deliver

Understanding what you and your users need is the first and most important step on our journey. We will work with you to define and understand the problem at hand. To help, we will follow industry best practice, using agile standards and principles – and we will bring our experience and judgement to bear.

The discovery phase will bring us together as partners under agreed project goals. At each step, we deliver critical outputs – agreeing a vision and key performance indicators from the start help us define what success should look like.  

We will develop a joint understanding of what a minimum viable product (MVP) – an early version of the product with enough features for users to feedback on – should be. 

This phase will help us to define and establish our partnership for the work that lies ahead. As well as understanding the challenge, it helps us to understand each other and bring our people together under a shared vision for success that then informs, and evolves throughout, the next phases.

Having defined what you need and what success looks like, we will plan and shape the work ahead, digging deeper into your business processes, the likely journeys your users will take, confirming a detailed response to the challenge. 

Key in this process is working with you to define the user research that’s needed, then assembling and organising the best team to work on the project. We will set the technical foundations for the work ahead, informing a plan for a digital architecture, as well as defining a process for delivering improvements continuously.  

Using agile methods, we involve users and other key stakeholders throughout, responding and adapting fast to feedback to meet user needs. We may create a performance framework and reporting dashboard to define and report success. Our people will stay open and candid throughout – we tell it as we see it. 

The final phase of our work will build on what we’ve learnt during discovery and preparation, ready to design, build and deliver the solution. 

We will work to establish transparency, along with a process of iteration with team ‘storming’ sessions, alongside continuous user testing and research.A regular feedback loop will inform ongoing development and keep the process clear. 

We will challenge you where we should but will always support you, remaining responsive to the challenge, able to flex our team up and down, interchanging capabilities as required – always maintaining a sharp focus on outcomes. 

Continuous service and product improvement, drawing on the feedback loop we have established, as well as testing against metrics, will help us to deliver your final product into a live environment. We will go live confident on the back of our approach that you and your users are happy with the outcome.  

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