Consulting Chronicles #7: The Priority Pyramid

The Priority Pyramid - The 8 Tiers of Software ConsultingIntroduction

The Priority Pyramid is a tool I use to stay on track with new consulting clients. It prioritizes how, who, and what I engage in at any given time. It can be overwhelming when thrust into a challenging situation, a code base in dire straits, and a frustrated team. You need a strong pillar of guidance.

This article goes over what parts make up the Priority Pyramid from a high level. I’ll talk about what milestones make up each section and how you navigate back and forward between the priorities.

When done, you should know how to engage your client’s team and tackle working on a large code base at a frustrated client site with 99 problems.

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Consulting Chronicles #6: Refactoring

RefactoringIntroduction

Refactoring is the discipline of applying a multitude of small, low-risk techniques to a code base in order fix and improve it. While corroborated by the software community, employing such techniques in a consulting context can be challenging because people are involved, often in a negative situation.

You need 2 weapons to win the refactoring battle. First, you need to understand what refactoring techniques are at your disposal and how to implement them. Below, I’ve listed the core ones I see needed time and time again. Second, you need to have a plan on how you engage the client company and their employees to allow you to do the first. That’s covered in the next article.

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Consulting Chronicles #5: Getting In, and Out, of the Industry

Today, I’ll talk about how to get into consulting, what the skills and expectations are, and what can cause you to get out.

What is Consulting?

Consulting in the Flash/Flex world usually consists of 3 tasks that may be related:

  1. Offer your architecture expertise.
  2. Offer your code mechanic expertise.
  3. Augment an existing team.

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Consulting Chronicles #4: Qualifying Leads

Rather than make the typical lateral developer move to learning a new language, runtime, or IDE, I’m instead trying to bring in more business. What I want to talk about today are my challenges in doing so regarding qualifying leads.

Introduction

Early in the year, I knew I was done with freelance, and working with other consulting firms. Freelance doesn’t make enough money, and working with other firms prevents you both from doing what you want to do, as well as making more money. I could either build my own firm, which required a ton of branding & marketing work, or just join an existing one. There are pro’s and con’s to each and after weighing the options for about a year, I just joined Web App Solution as a partner for a year to see how it went.

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