Condition and Strategy Assessments

Most of the time, our customers engage us because they have some piece of existing software that most-decidedly isn’t “doing what they want.”   Their immediate question (and, certainly, ours) is, “what are my realistic options, what should I do now, and how much might it cost?”   All perfectly reasonable questions.   And, questions that we (of course...) don’t have immediate answers to.   (Customers who are contemplating entirely-new projects are basically in the same situation, and we do not profess to have immediate answers for them, either.)

Our solution to our mutual problem is ... methodical research.

• At the very beginning of an engagement, we don’t know what your situation is, and you of course don’t know what we can do for you.
• If you are dealing with an existing application, its condition is ... unknown ... and there is only one way to objectively determine what viable strategies exist.   (“A good guess” is not that way.)
• This is no place for “a sales pitch.”   This is business, and both parties have a very large stake in seeing to it that they will proceed from a mutual position of factual, defensible knowledge about their situation and choices.
• Doing this properly requires time, and therefore, money.   It is not appropriate to do this in anticipation of future sales, because to do so would bias the results obtained.
• Like a building, computer software is built “foundation first.”

We charge for this service.   And so, our conclusions are the paid-for deliverables:   they are not biased by any future business that we might hope to receive.   Our goal is to methodically evaluate and to recommend to you exactly what we consider to be your technically-viable options, and the best reasonable procedure and timeline for achieving them.

If you subsequently decide to engage us to do the work, this research is the basis for all of the task orders that will be issued throughout the project.   One of the most-important causes for our continued success in this business is that we explicitly define and scope the work that is to be done – never considering this to be part of the sales-and-marketing process.