Software Factory
Focus on your business, not on technical or production details.
Some projects simply do not justify investing in inhouse development and ressources. The reasons might be technical complexity, overall duration, or time to market requirements. To allow for complete externalization of application and platform development, VA Consulting has created a Software Factory that allows the needed applications and projects to be produced and delivered according to your budget, your timing requirements, and your quality standards.
More than simply a team of developers, the Software Factory is a real industrial production shop where developers, architects and sysadmins benefit from a highly efficient work environment. They also benefit from constant coaching and mentoring by at least two senior, certified Zend engineers to make sure that quality standards and best practises are applied continously.
The Software Factory takes functional requirements documentations as a starting point. We tackle all aspects of technical analysis, production, reviewing, and project management, for a fixed discussed price and delivery date.
This context allows us to take responsibility towards a result, providing you with a guarantee that the product will be delivered on time, in a state-of-art quality, and for the agreed price
Choosing between a fixed price and daily rate project
We generally recommend a fixed price approach for projects that have a minimum workload of 20 man-days, which are clearly specc’ed from a strategy and functional point of view, and which have clear time-to-market and/or budget constraints. Although these projects remain somehow flexible in terms of planning and prioritization of features, the start and end points must remain unchanged throughout the development lifecycle. Providing us with a detailed requirements specification, or asking us to assist you in writing one, is a must.
For every other project and sub-project, outplacement or per-day approaches are well-suited because they give you flexibility in the definition of plannings, priorities, and budgets allocated to given features.
Outplacement
Temporary increase of your inhouse PHP production capacity.
Sometimes, your inhouse PHP dev team just doesn’t come around to it. The project timing might be too optimistic, or the technical complexity too high. The typical situations where some external expert help is the key! Besides our coaching and project management services, we are also able to increase your inhouse productivity by placing experienced, and if needed, certified developers and architects inside your walls.
Opposed as to the Software Factory, these coworkers are managed directly by you at your location. We don’t control the production, delivery, nor the planning, but we take responsibility towards the experience and skillsets of these profiles. At the same time, we ask our customers the permission to retreat the profile from their mission at least one to two days per month in order to make sure they keep a link to the VA Consulting “mothership” and benefit from our internal training and coaching, and to make sure they can exchange experience, know-how and problem solving with their other colleagues.
You might also combine the two aspects of Software Factory and Outplacement, having a team of developers working in our offices with their productivity enhancing environments, while managing these people’s planning yourself.
Do not hesitate to get in touch with us to discuss what is the best setup for your specific business needs.
