Robin Churcher, Mark Tillison, Neil Bostrom present from Compsoft, Peter Brett Associates project team.
Generally, the initial meeting with a client is to establish needs, business background and anticipated budget for a project, with a second meeting to understand the business processes and the environment in which the bespoke application is to be used.
PBA were better prepared, had established a budget and a statement of requirement document from which to work. We were able to cover both objectives in one meeting.
We quickly established what the business drivers are for the project, what the principal objectives are and what value the proposed system would add.
As a growing organisation with offices in a number of countries, PBA has an established Marketing Department based here in the UK, who's responsibility included the corporate web sites and the content of each.
Using classic ASP and SQL Server, Steve had created a bespoke content management system to enable the marketing department to control content in the main UK web site, but was constantly asked for changes and additional funtionality. The application was also limited to the main UK site.
With a growing number of other important IT projects, it was impossible for PBA to justify Steve's time.
Among others, we agreed the following requirements
- Technologies: ASP.NET using C#.NET, .NET Framework 2.0
- The solution would need to accommodate existing site design
- The marketing department would need complete control over the content and layout of each and every web page using dynamic, user friendly tools
- PBA hoped to minimise risk through ownership of the source code to the system
- We had a budget to work to
