Creating a Seamless Partnership:

A client guide for working well together as technology partners

Our goal is for you to consider Smooth Fusion your technology partner, not just another vendor. Like any partnership, producing great work requires communication and trust. This guide gives information and tips to help us work well together. 

Billing

Smooth Fusion offers several billing models for project work.

Time & Materials

In this model, you may request an estimate for your project before any work is started. An estimate is meant to help with budgeting and is not a fixed-bid price quote. Instead, Smooth Fusion team members log all time spent on your project and that time is invoiced at the end of each month.

Block Hours

In this model, you purchase a sum of hours that can be allocated to any project task. You pre-pay for a block of hours to receive a discounted, blended rate. At the end of each month, total hours worked are deducted from the pre-paid block. 

For example, you may purchase a block of 50, 100, or 200, more hours. Your blended rate discount is determined by the number of hours purchased. There is no expiration for these hours, so you may choose to spend them at any time.

Fixed Bid

In this model, you are given a fixed price for work to be performed. To engage in a fixed-bid statement of work, all requirements and important details must be gathered, documented, and agreed upon. Any alteration to the documented scope of the project requires a change order. The statement of work will reflect the fixed price and billing milestones.

In a fixed bid arrangement, the client will be given a fixed price quote for work to be performed. Smooth Fusion will not exceed the amount quoted to the client for this work.

Before we can give a fixed price quote, we must first gather all the requirements in detail. Because we are guaranteeing a price, most details are important and cannot be skipped.

In a fixed bid arrangement, the work is warrantied for 30 days following the project launch.

Fixed bid billing comes with two significant setbacks for clients, which is why they are not our default arrangement:

1. Because the price is going to be guaranteed and the work warrantied, fixed bid quotes will often be “padded” to account for risk. For example, an internal estimate of 10 hours may be increased to 13 hours before being presented as a fixed bid quote.
2.  Because the price is based on the original scope, any changes to scope, even small ones, will usually require a change order with additional costs. (see below)

Dedicated Developer

Clients who have a continual flow of ongoing work may choose to contract a dedicated developer. Dedicated developers can be contracted either half-time or full-time and multiple developers can be dedicated.

The dedicated developer billing arrangement will always come with accompanying time for project management and quality assurance. In that way, Smooth Fusion does not offer development only as a service.

Project Team

Project Manager (PM)

Your project manager is here to manage your project to successful completion, on time, on budget, and with high quality. Your project manager will keep you up to date on the status of the project, organize review meetings, and is daily driving the project forward inside of Smooth Fusion.

The project manager is your primary point of contact for any project work. If you have schedule questions, scope questions, find bugs, or need any other information about your project, you can always go directly to your project manager. The project manager may involve other team members to help answer your question.

Solution Architect (SA)

The solution architect is tasked with gathering and documenting requirements for projects and ultimately designing (architecting) a solution for our clients. The solution architect will ask all the detailed questions to ensure that we are building the right solution to meet your business needs. Smooth Fusion solution architects are our most experienced team members.

Designer

Your Smooth Fusion designer has specific skills and training in web and app design. The designer’s role is to ensure your software looks fantastic across the whole web. Whether Smooth Fusion is providing the creative, or your designers are doing so, our designer will review all designs to ensure they meet the right technical requirements and are sufficiently documented so that details are not lost in translation to developers.

Others

Your project team also has developers, quality assurance specialists, and an IT director. These team members are hard at work building, testing, and deploying your software. You may hear from them in special circumstances, but your primary points of contact will be the roles described above.

Customer Success Management

Besides the members of the project team, Smooth Fusion clients have another point of contact: the customer success manager.

The customer success manager is here to understand your organization’s strategy and to ensure the work done by Smooth Fusion meets your goals. If the project team is primarily concerned with “what” we build, the customer success manager is primarily concerned with “why” we build it.

Besides working with you on strategic planning, your customer success manager will write statements of work (SOW) and is your point of contact for invoicing.

Change Management

Once your project begins, your project manager is your primary point of contact to request changes. You can discuss changes with your project manager during review meetings or by email.

Your project manager is going to track all change requests and ensure they are driven to completion. To ensure every change is successful, the project manager will take many of the steps below for each change request:

• Work with the Solution Architect and/or designer in order to clarify and document change requirements
• Work with the designer to ensure the change does not affect other parts of the site
• Analyze and update the budget. This often requires communicating budget changes to you
• Analyze and update the schedule. A change of project schedule can have a cascading effect to all members of the project team. Changing a schedule involves communicating changes internally, to the client who requested the change, and sometimes other clients affected by the changed schedule
• Update all reporting
• Brief the project team on the change and ensure the existing project plans are updated appropriately

Project changes are inevitable. But, from the list above, it is easy to see how a continual flow of change requests can cause quite a bit of work or possibly increase project risk. Changes can quickly derail an otherwise successful project if not managed tightly.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when considering a change:

Describe the Changes Thoroughly

Documenting and researching change requirements can be time-consuming. Therefore, the more detail that can be provided to describe the change, the better. More details reduce the amount of time spent clarifying details.

Batch Changes

As much as reasonable, try to send change requests in batches. Managing changes takes time. When changes are sent sporadically, the amount of time required to manage them can increase greatly.

Estimating Changes is Time Consuming

Most changes take time to document, research, and estimate. Some changes are easier to implement than they are to document and estimate. Sometimes, it is important to know an estimate before approving the change. But, it is important to keep change estimates to a minimum in order to keep the project team focused on implementation.

Change Estimate Time Increases In Proportion to the Estimate Detail Required

The Solution Architect can often give a "rough order of magnitude" estimate quickly and easily. This kind of estimate can swing greatly during implementation but is "cheap" to produce. However, if a more exact estimate is needed the time to create that estimate will likely increase.

Weekly Reporting

Every week, your project manager will send you a Weekly Project Review report. One important note about this report:

Note: The Statement of Work (SOW) is the only legal agreement for the project. Therefore, typos or problems with the weekly report do not supersede or alter the SOW. If there is a problem with a weekly report, it should be brought to the attention of the PM.

The Weekly Project Review contains:

• A project status overview
• Key outstanding questions A list of risks, if applicable
• A budget vs actual spend breakdown
• A list of issues for a sprint

A note about the budget vs actual spend: The Weekly Project Review pulls time from our time tracking system. Due to vacation time, differing time zones, and other scheduling situations, the time in the Weekly Project Review is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. This information simply helps our clients gauge the rough project progress.

The Weekly Project Review is your opportunity to gauge project progress. If you see any information in the report that you do not understand, please contact your project manager immediately.

Smooth Fusion Service Desk Instructions

Smooth Fusion customers may open service requests with Smooth Fusion through its Smooth Fusion Service Desk. Customers with an existing service contract are granted access to this portal so they may open tickets directly with our team. 

Within this Page

Billing
Project Team
Customer Success Management
Change Management
Weekly Reporting

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