Mentoring

Complicated Environment, Young Team

A young and inexperienced technical team for our client was responsible for supporting and developing a product based upon a wide range of technologies.

Initially we were employed for over a day/week, helping the team deal with urgent technical issues. As we did so, we were open and inclusive as to what we were doing, so that the team were able to learn not only how to deal with the problem, but how to analyse and solve problems. As the team grew in ability and confidence we were able to reduce the time we spend with the organisation to under three hours/month. As the team have been always encouraged to tackle new and interesting problems, the company has retained a very stable team, which in turn has helped in customer retention as they are known to their customers, and the development team all have in-depth knowledge of the product.

It is now the case that we are called only occasionally with specific questions. For example, the lead developer contacted us about a query he was writing. He had a query which generated he right results, but he was aware that it could be written in another way which would increase its performance and its scalability to larger datasets. Over a series of short conversations with us we helped him make a number of changes to the query, reducing its execution time from forty minutes to fifty seconds. Also during the process his knowledge and understanding had increased so that in future he would be able to use the same techniques without further assistance.