Services
  • Technology Needs Assessment. Answers the questions, "how well is my IT serving my needs, and what, if anything, needs to change?" Interviews with internal and external users and analysis of current technology lead to a custom report highlighting what is and isn't working and what to do about it. A menu of choices is provided, with costs and benefits estimated in comparison to the status quo. Requires 2 weeks to one month and 50 hours of work.
  • Software Project Management. A comprehensive service covering every aspect of technical project management, from requirements and soliciting bids to deployment and acceptance testing. Provides the practical skill and experience your organization needs on a temporary basis. Minimum 3 month engagement; maximum 12 month engagement, 40 to 100 hours per month.
  • Usability Testing. Testing an existing product reveals usability problems which are reducing user adoption. Testing early in a development cycle is even more cost-effective for two reasons: more usable mental models can be created, and developers can internalize the need and means for usability. Service includes recruiting usability testers, designing tests, facilitating tests, and reporting results. Ideally, your developers observe the tests and participate in discussion. For product testing, results can include a usability report or a detailed list of usability defects; for exploratory prototyping, result reporting is more ad-hoc. One round of testing requires, typically, 40 hours of work over one month.
Technology
  • Web interfaces: HTML, CSS
  • Web platforms: Apache, AOLserver, OpenACS
  • Databases: Postgresql, Oracle, MS SQL Server
  • Operating Systems: Linux (Red Hat, Debian), BSD Unix, MS Windows NT/2000
Skills
  • 8 years of experience managing software development, including internet services, web sites, web applications; closed and open source models; non-profit, corporate, and start-up environments; waterfall, spiral, agile, and unmanaged development models
  • All aspects of software quality, including: reliability, security, usability, maintainability, upgradability.
  • All stages of software development, including market assessment, requirements gathering and documentation, architecture design, interface design, coding, quality assurance and control, release management, deployment, and maintenance.
  • Designing and operating production systems, including server and network planning, redundancy and fault tolerance, recovery and backup, capacity planning, and staged deployment.