Q1. Why outsource ?
A: You can :
Rent the best skills only when you need it, without the overhead of on site employment.
Improve the projects' financial effectiveness by reducing the development costs.
Improve your company focus within its workforce. Your existing staff won't have to make a rapid change in case you are facing a new or unexpected problem.

Q2. What can Higrade do for you ?
A: Our staff can assist you with the design, implementation and maintenance of IT solutions for a wide area of applications:
Custom mobile applications
Sales Force Automation (SFA)
Field Force Automation (FFA)
Distribution and data collecting applications
Desktop applications
Client-Server architectures
Industrial software
Information kiosks
Another service is team hire, which puts a team of professionals (individually approved by you) at your permanent service. This is a long-term type of contract that can be used to shift off-site the majority of IT development in your company, while maintaining tight control and drastically reducing costs.

Q3. How to submit a project request ?
A: You can e-mail us at higrade@higradeworld.com, or you can send us a message using the contact form. Shortly after sending your request, you will receive our answer.

Q4. Must I first write a complete spec ?
A: No, this is not necessary. We can start with only a draft description of what you need, and we will work together to refine it into a full-featured functional specification. Based on this, a time and cost estimate is provided by us. After it’s approval, project build is started.

Q5. What if I am not satisfied ?
A: We do our best to avoid these situations, but if any problems should occur, the manager assigned to your project will try to resolve them. We believe that the vast majority of problems can be solved, and our cooperation can continue. Nevertheless, if no common ground can be reached, you will not have to pay the modules you reject and you will receive our apologies.

Q6. How can I view & control the project development ?
A: There are multiple options available:
The Internet provides an instant communication channel. We make available a 24 hour reliable connection for this purpose.
We provide regular status reports on how the projects are progressing.
On request, we can provide interim builds and results, either by uploading it to your server , or by posting it on our server for download.
The development is flexible; if necessary, upon your request, we can discuss changes in the project workflow, features or priorities .

Q7. How can I protect my Intellectual Property ?
A: For each contract, there is an option for a NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) customized to your own need. Not every contract requires this protection, but it is available on your demand.

Q8. What is the minimum amount of workload that can be contracted ?
A: The minimum workload is 30 hours. This enables you to start with a small project, and give you a good preview of working with us on a larger scale. Additionally, discounts are available when dealing with large projects or long-term cooperation.

Q9. How can payment be done ?
A: You will receive an invoice that will detail the hours spent on each project. The payment can be done in USD or EUR or INR by means of wire transfer. The details of this will be discussed when starting a project.

Q10. What is the general workflow of a project ?
A: 1. The first step in a potential collaboration for developing a new project is to have a basic description from your side of the system that is to be implemented. This first document needs not be very detailed from a technical point of view. We seek mostly to understand the general (functional) requirements and the environment where the system will run. At this early stage this information is needed for us to have an accurate understanding of the project's ‘big picture’.
2. One of our staff members will be assigned to assist you in describing the workflow of the project, from a functional point of view.
3. We shall then present you with a document that will describe our understanding of the behavior of the system, a so-called ‘vision’.
4. If you agree that our understanding of the problem is an accurate one, we shall continue with developing the system's requirements. This material will describe:
The functional specification of the project (use cases may appear in order to be sure that the interpretation of the data/work flow is correct)
The description of the technical requirements for the environment (OS, additional software needed, restrictions regarding security, etc)
5. Once you have approved this requirements specification we start working on preliminary planning in terms of time and workload. As part of the dialog that will follow, you may also tell us your ideas on features, priorities and any other area of our planning that can be adjusted / improved.
6. After we agree on this time and workload plan, there are two main options on how to continue our cooperation.
The first one is to freeze and schedule of the project and continue the development according to the approved specification. Should this be the case no adjustments to the features/limitations are possible since the whole project is running under the fixed requirements/fixed budget development at least until its first release.
Since sometimes our clients only see some of the features/demands of a system in the later stages of the work, we propose for this case another way of completing a project. The alternative is to work in a more flexible, module-oriented approach. Once the time and workload plan are approved developing is started. Upon receiving the preliminary testing and milestone releases you have the option to propose changes in the way the project unfolds. The additional workload and time is considered and approved by you accordingly. This is useful especially when the scale of the system remains unknown in the early stages of planning and is established only based on tests, or you want to have something done in a short time and based on the results add features/modules to it.