Retainer

If your company needs expert technical advice or leadership without having to pay for a full-time employee at senior rates, you can retain me for a period of time and call on me when you need me. I can provide honest and prudent advice and offer technical expertise.

I do my best to keep this rate as low as possible because I believe that my clients should never have to think about whether it’s worth it to get my advice. My goal is ‘sustainable, but cheap enough that it’s a no-brainer for a half-hour call’.

Project Discovery

Discovery is about answering as many questions up front as you can that might otherwise cause a project to explode later. It sets you up for success in the same way that clearing landmines from your field helps you farm.

Doing a discovery project is mostly done by sitting down with stakeholders and asking a whole bunch of questions over a couple of sessions.

Here’s a list of some of the things I aim to establish:

• What are the project requirements?
• What’s the goal of the project?
• What would accomplishing the goal mean for your company?
• How will we know we’re succeeding?
• What do we know and believe about the thoughts and needs of the people using the project? How do they talk about the problem they experience?
• What’s the least amount of work we could do to confirm any questions or hypotheses we might have?
• What’s the least amount of work we have to do to meet the objective?
• What software is already in use?
• Is there existing ‘off-the-shelf’ software we could use to solve the problem?
• If we’re planning to tie into them, what’s needed to access existing systems?

At the end of this process—which usually takes a week or two—I produce a document that captures all of this information and presents next steps. I aim for the document to be thorough enough that you could hand it to another developer and they could get started the very next day.

Software Development - Bespoke / Off-the-shelf Integration

If you need software to move your business forward or manage your risk, we can work together to integrate and customize an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution.

Or if there’s nothing out there that quite does what you need it to do, I can build you custom software to meet your exact need with tight integration to your existing systems.

I also am able to leverage my professional network of other software developers and can assemble a highly skilled team if your timeline or need warrants.