While it is not readily seen from the website, Launch Code has been busy. There is a lot going on behind the scenes. Starting a company is like planting a seed in the ground. All of the growth is taking place below ground. We have managed to get our first few jobs and are definitely putting down our roots. Steiner and I are busy setting up our core processes and using our own know-how to optimize it.

Launch Code is a company that solves problems. It is important to us that we use our own tools and methodologies to solve our own problems. The first problem we want to tackle takes place at the beginning of our process. Our first phase on every project is Planning and Development. We spend a lot of time generating a response to an RFP because we know that a good plan can save an enormous amount of time and money, overall.

Generating this level of work takes an enormous effort because there are a lot of tasks associated with generating a good bid. The basic details about the project need to be organized. Then, there are a variety of writing assignments that need to happen. We develop a detailed client letter, creative treatment and then a project overview. If there isn’t a proper functional requirements document, we create an outline of the basic features and functions as part of our project road map.

Then, we break down the entire project across the 8 phases of our process to define what will happen when. Based on that breakdown, we start to wrap our head around the numbers and the calendar. Once we get all this information together it’s time to make it look pretty and put it into our bid template.
On average, we can spend 3 to 7 days generating a bid depending on the complexity of the project.

Solution:

We are looking at taking our bidding and pitching process and building it into a database. Over the last week, we’ve begun to rough out the first phases of what a data driven process would look like. For example, the last step of our bid process is to integrate all the text into InDesign. In our first few bids, this was simply a cut and paste exercise.  However, InDesign has a nice little feature that lets you import XML.

So on our last bid we did two things.
The first was to map out the various sections of information and assign XML brackets to each of them. The second was to take our InDesign template and format it so that each section would be filled dynamically by the XML data.
This step alone has saved us time.

The next steps are to begin to map out the database structure and start to develop the front end. I am going to be looking into Adobe Flex as the front end solution.

As geeky as it sounds, this stuff is exciting to us.