RMI Approach

How We Work

We believe that how you do something is almost as important as what you do. Our approach reflects what we insist on providing our clients: quality products and services, cost-effectiveness, reliable budget and time estimates, and transparent insight into everything we do. While the process must adapt to the needs of our partners, we feel the key to project success lies with the following approach.

Discovery

We must understand your needs. What does your company do? What are your short, mid, and long-term goals? Who is your customer? What is your brand identify? What products or services do you offer? Who is your competition? What are your online needs? What's your timeframe? What's the scope of work you'd like to address in that timeframe? These are just some of the questions we'll want to work through with you. This will allow us to match our proposals and deliverables to the needs of both you and your customer. We'll also use this time to let you know more about us - who we are, what we've done, and how we work.

Requirements

Building a successful web site or application is much like building a house. It requires careful planning and a detailed 'blueprint'. It's not enough to say "We'd like a dining room". What are the dimensions of that room? How many people does it need to accommodate? What material would you like for the floor? What color should the walls be? The answers to these questions determine your material costs. They determine what kind of resources you need to build the room. They determine how long it will take to build. They impact how the rooms around it will be built.

All of these examples have an -exact- parallel in the process of web development. It's not enough to 'figure it out' as you go. It's not right for you to 'trust us to fill in the blanks' because we're the professionals. We need to work with you - efficiently and comprehensively - to develop clear requirements for what needs to be built from a functional, design, and technical perspective.

Design

Once we have worked with you to identify your requirements, we need to engage our graphic design and information architecture teams to develop the visual look and feel of your site or application, taking into account your customer and brand. In most cases we will develop a series of lightweight 'wireframes' that demonstrate the basic layout of your site, the pages or features available, and how a user navigates or interacts with those pages and features (workflows). This provides a clear understanding of how your site will operate before the final part of the design process: mock-ups. In this final phase, our design team will deliver a series of detailed 'screen shots' illustrating exactly how your web site will look and function. At every stage of the Design process we will be working with you to validate and refine the product we're delivering.

Project Planning

While Project Management best practices will be applied from the beginning of our engagement with you, the need for formalized planning is most critical prior to starting what is often the most costly and risky aspect of a project - web development. Using the Requirements and Designs produced in the prior stages, we will work with our development team to assemble a very specific cost estimate and project schedule. Each page and each component of your site will be mapped to a specific set of tasks, resources, and time/cost estimates. Using this information, we can work with you to 'scope' the project to meet your specific time and budget requirements, as well as provide clear milestones to track and control the progress of development.

Development

Using our team of content, video, and web developers, or working in collaboration with your own internal development resources, we will take the Requirements, Designs, and Project Plan developed in the previous phases and build your site. During the process we will provide both regular status updates at a frequency and format of your choosing, and progressive insight into and examples of what is being developed. This will allow you to both provide feedback and view the progress of your project. Updates to the original requirements or plans will be managed via a lightweight change management process, whose goal is to provide clear before-the-fact insight into any cost or timeline impacts related to a needed or requested change. Throughout the development process your site will be thoroughly tested (QA'd) to ensure that it meets your requirements and is ready for your customers.

Maintenance

We view our clients as partners, not disposable customers. When your project with us is complete, we are available to support your needs and answer your questions, reliably and responsively. In addition, we build our products to allow you the ability to control and customize as much as possible, limiting the need for you to come back to us for basic changes. We feel quality service after initial delivery is not only our ethical responsibility, but will make you want to come back to us for your next online initiative and recommend us to others.