Frequently Asked Questions
Q9. What will DCI deliver to me before executing a project? How will DCI communicate with me about the scope and direction of a project so I can sign off on it?
After we’ve talked with you about your goals and gotten a sense of your, Discovery Corps will deliver to you a project proposal. The following are standard sections of a proposal:
- Goal – By having DCI reiterate the goal of the project, it allows you to see that we have correctly understood your purpose and vision for the work.
- Current Situation – This is a detailed description of the current state, the obstacles to overcome, and the resources available. We also outline any risks that we envision that might impact the project.
- Deliverables – Here we spell out what we will deliver to you at the end of the project
- Assumptions – Communicating about the assumptions we have again allows you to check that we correctly understand your business and your data.
- Pricing – A breakdown of cost for each major component of the project.
Q10. How long will it take DCI to complete my project?
Since we tailor our work to your specific needs, every project is different. Once we have a sense of your data and we’ve worked with you to clearly define the goal of your project, we can give you a good estimate of the time needed to complete the project.
Q11. How much time will my personnel need to devote to working with DCI on our project?
Although this varies by the project and our clients’ preferences, a typical engagement requires about one hour per week from you or your staff, for asking questions and doing follow-up. The most intense interactions are often on the front end, when the data is being exchanged and loaded. Any anomalies or deviations from expectations do require discussion and resolution. After that, the ongoing involvement is dependent on your interest and your desire to learn more through collaboration with us.
Q12. Is any special hardware/software required when I hire DCI?
The short answer is "No". DCI can accept data from you in many formats, and we’ll deliver our results to you in a format that’s easy to use. No special data mining, data visualization, or statistical software is necessary for you to view the results of our work. Often the reports we deliver are in Adobe Acrobat, Excel, or PowerPoint, which are almost universally available.