Software and technology need ongoing maintenance, so all development projects need to allow a budget for support and maintenance that is required after initial delivery.
We discuss this as part of our proposal to you, and include in a development order an appropriate support arrangement: a monthly support allowance, time and materials (“do and charge”), or a block of prepaid hours.
Some sites require ongoing work of a minor nature that can be undertaken by junior staff, and for this we offer monthly support and maintenance contracts at a special low rate. Typically, the customer requirement for such work can be explained in a few lines, and these are managed as Change Requests.
More complex jobs, often needing detailed requirements gathering and design and requiring more experienced programmers, are managed as individual projects. This might be straightforward system enhancements or significant investigations to determine the cause of a service problem which is particular to your site or system and not to the operation of the hosting service in general. For this, we operate on a “do and charge” basis at standard hourly rates, or through blocks of prepaid hours at a discount rate.
How to request help
A dedicated customer email address can be made available with a support and maintenance allowance, or requests can be made to the standard Help Desk contacts. Requests are initially handled by the help desk, and are tracked as Change Requests.
We can often estimate how long an individual Change Request might take, but because of their scale and the need for speed we do not provide a formal quote and order for each. If the work is big enough to be managed as a change request, you will see the CR number identified in timesheets.
Projects to deliver new functionality, that require more highly skilled programmers, and which require a formal quote and order for the new work are not undertaken with these arrangements.