Sixgold Technologies provides software consulting services to help customers make the correct technical choices during the early, formative stages of a project.
Our consultants and business analysts possess many years of experience at the sharp end of the software development industry. They are all technically knowledgeable and have first-hand experience of developing, managing and delivering complex software development projects themselves. All are the product of many years of training to our own exacting standards and have previously worked on a wide range of diverse projects to obtain the experience necessary to perform a consulting or business analyst role.
We specialise in software consultancy, as opposed to general IT consultancy, because this is where we feel we can provide the most value to our clients. In particular, we focus on helping our customers by:
Advising on project scope, to understand where technology can provide value for money in meeting business requirements, and where it can&rsquot
Producing specifications and designs to translate those business requirements into well-defined, concrete proposals that can be implemented by a subsequent software development project
We can also advise on search engine optimisation techniques to clarify the facts amongst all the hype.
At the start of a new project, clients often have grand plans for what the project will deliver. These plans are typically (and correctly) defined in terms of business requirements and business benefits. When contemplating the development of custom software for such a project, it is possible (in theory at least) to implement these grand designs in their entirety. But it is not necessarily cost effective to do so, nor the right decision for the business to take.
Sixgold Technologies can provide consultancy during the project scoping phase to ensure that project deliverables will indeed provide value for money. It&rsquos often safe to assume that the client is the expert with respect to business requirements and benefits, but Sixgold Technologies can provide technological expertise to make the client aware of the consequences of decisions taken at this early stage.
It is quite common for business requirements to seemingly require technical solutions which are complex and relatively costly &ndash often more complex and costly than actually prove necessary upon closer (and informed) inspection. Sixgold Technologies consultants can help the client to understand these cost / benefit trade-offs and to explore alternative, potentially more cost effective solutions that still satisfy the underlying business requirements. Such discussions can have a significant impact on the business case for a project, and ultimately the value for money that the project delivers.
One of the biggest problems to beset software development projects, and a major cause of project failure, is the lack of an adequate specification and design. It&rsquos easy to see why &ndash the client&rsquos domain of expertise is their business requirements the developer&rsquos domain of expertise is their technical knowledge, and they don&rsquot usually overlap. We call this the &lsquobusiness-IT&rsquo gap. The specification is intended to bridge this gap and translate the business requirements into a definitive technical description of the project deliverables from which developers can work. But creating this specification is difficult because it requires knowledge of both domains of expertise.
This is where Sixgold Technologies can help. Our consultants all possess many years of first-hand experience of software development and project management. They understand the issues that can result from underspecified projects, and what is required from a specification in order to avoid them.
Crucially, all of our employees are extremely technically skilled. And because of our recruitment profile, they are also very good at understanding the clients business requirements and translating these into technical requirements. We believe this to be one of Our key strengths as an organisation &ndash we engage closely with each customer and strive to achieve a deep understanding of their business and how the project objectives relate to it. Only by doing this can we be sure really to understand what the customer actually wants, in order to bridge the business-IT gap.
The output of a specification consultancy phase is typically documentation (and possibly other deliverables) that defines the scope of the project from a technical perspective, making reference to the business requirements where applicable. For large projects, a high-level component design might also be undertaken in order to help size the project more accurately. Together, these deliverables are sufficient to allow software development organisations (including Softwire if requested) to quote on a fixed-price basis for development of the required software.
