What We Do
Some of our clients don't want us to create any software at all, or a
web site either. They want advice: should we do this or that? Which
product is best for us? How should we manage the migration to a new
tool? We've been providing advice and consulting for two decades, and
because we don't sell software or hardware, only our own services, you
can trust the advice we give you. After all, you pay for it directly, so
you don't need to worry that we're overcharging for anything else to
cover the free advice. Why not get in touch
and see if we can help? If you think you need advice on a sporadic or
regular basis, check out our Mentoring
services.
Which Microsoft technologies are worth adopting?
We enjoy a delightful relationship with Microsoft, employing a
Regional
Director and MVP, participating in multiple betas, alphas, and so on.
Our staff attend and speak at all the major Microsoft conferences
including TechEd and the PDC. We know what's coming next, and we've
already started working with it. We can save you from investing a lot of
time and work learning a technology without a future, and we can speed
your learning of the new one, too.
What would be the best architecture for this project?
There are so many ways to put software together. Should you write a
Windows or a Web application, or both? What is ClickOnce and how can it
minimize deployment pain? Do Web Services come into this? Will SQL
Reporting Services save time on this project? How can you support both
SQL and Oracle data stores with the same code base? How can you reuse
your existing C++ or VB 6 code and bring it onto the .NET Framework without porting
it all to C#? Would SharePoint be a good platform to build our
collaborative site on? We can help you tackle these questions and many more.
We've been through it before and we can share our experience with you.
(If you want help getting it implemented, we are do-ers as well as
advisors.)
Mentoring
Technology changes incredibly fast these days and for many
organizations, traditional training and books just don't work when you
need to keep up with such fast change. Our
mentoring program is designed to help software developers (individuals
or teams) cope with this rate of change. Mentoring is a short-term
involvement that brings new skills into your group or raises the skill
level of an existing team. We provide on-site, on-the-job technical
advice and tutoring, or if you prefer, you can send someone to us to
learn! Our mentors draw on their instructing
experience, certified technical knowledge and
vast exposure to real IT
projects so they help your staff to meet goals quickly and efficiently.
What's the Difference Between Mentoring and Consulting?
So many firms, with wildly varying business models, describe
themselves as consultants and their offerings as consulting. Some of
them have an army of suit-wearing developers that they send to your
office day after day, week after week, charging you for all their time
no matter what's accomplished, running your project, and leaving you in
pretty much the same state they found you -- except you've spent a lot
of money and perhaps you have a completed project. Others use the word
to describe an independent practitioner who joins your firm almost as a
member of staff, bringing a very specific skill that you need for months
or years, and who has no clients other than you. There's very little
advice-giving or information transfer in the process. Still others,
mostly management consultants in my experience, come in with their army
of suits, tell you what you should do, and leave -- they don't
implement, they only advise!
We offer a variety of services to our clients. What we call
consulting is giving people advice, making
suggestions for what people should do, and so on. We also offer
programming and web development, where we create software or a web site
for you that meets your requirements and helps to solve your business
problems. And separate from those services, we offer mentoring.
Mentoring is about boosting skill and productivity levels with
one-on-one contact. Oh yes, we advise, we suggest, we even lead
sometimes, and it's all focused on making your developers better
positioned to solve your business problems going forward. A successful
mentoring project is all about knowledge transfer.
How can You Arrange a Mentoring Program?
Just call
or email us and discuss your circumstances:
how many people need to
learn, what do they need to learn, when do they
need to start using the
new skills? We'll work something out that will
get you productive as
quickly as possible.