Communication
Depending on your project, you may be engaging a sizeable team to work on your behalf. This might include:
- A business development manager who spoke with you during first contact, and checked up on your project during and after development is complete.
- An account manager responsible for product delivery and communication between clients, developers, and other parties.
- A project manager responsible for resource allocation and troubleshooting.
- A designer responsible for making your app effective and beautiful.
- A marketing/creative manager able to assist with your marketing and advertising strategy.
- One or more developers, frequently with diverse specialist skills.
- A quality assurance engineer responsible for testing.
Our clients have direct access to all members of their team. The account manager is the primary contact in every project, the glue that binds the people together and ensures that we are tracking every requirement and request – but if you need to speak with anyone on the project directly then we encourage this to occur (just keep the account manager in the loop please so they can do their job!).
We provide a number of tools to assist communication and accommodate others based on client needs. Our primary methods of communication during a project are:
- Face-to-face meetings.
- Basecamp (online project management and communication software).
- Email.
- Phone.
- Messaging apps such as Skype and WhatsApp.
Meetings are necessary, sometimes. Depending on your chosen Account Management package, we encourage clients to meet with the account manager to discuss sprint progress every two weeks, and on other occasions related to milestones or challenges. Meetings are counter-productive if they occur too frequently though, so we provide many other methods of communication that are more suitable for conveying other bits of information.
Basecamp is a solid project management platform used by many companies. We’ll create a Basecamp project for you, and invite you to join. Signing up is free, it just requires an email address, and will grant access to project discussions, documents and other assets and notes stored in the cloud. The biggest attractions to Basecamp are that it is very accessible, reliable and easy to use. Discussions in Basecamp are linked to your email, and you will be notified when new posts are made. Basecamp works better than email as it maintains a searchable history of conversations and documents related to a project in a single place, accessible to all members of the project – even those who join later are able to go back through old conversations and get up to speed.
We all have email addresses that we check regularly, and it’s a great way to reach people. We do prefer Basecamp be used where possible, but some of our clients insist on email as their primary communication, and we are fine with that. Most emails will be to or from an account manager, and for others please keep them on the CC so they can properly manage their projects!
What can we say about phones? Dapper Apps specialize in the development of mobile apps, so obviously we are big fans of mobile phones! Apps provide alternative and often cheaper (or free) alternatives to the humble phone call, but nothing is simpler that a quick chat and we’re happy to take your call! We will endeavour to follow up every phone call with an email or Basecamp message to ensure we are all 100% clear on what has been discussed.
Skype and WhatsApp provide excellent alternatives to phone calls in many circumstances. Most people have accounts with one of these applications, or something similar, and it’s a great way to make a point ‘in person’ that would be difficult to discuss in a written form. This also works well for remote clients.
Sometimes our clients use other project management, tracking and communication tools such as Trello, Asana, or Slack; and we’re happy to accommodate those where required.
We are strong advocates of best practice including open and transparent communication. You should and can expect polite, respectful, honest, and sincere communication from all Dapper Apps staff, at all times.