Consulting and Mentoring

IDesign's Architecture Consulting engagements are short, dedicated, effective, and very intense. We capture in a structured engineered way the various design aspects of the system, from decomposition into services to required runtime behavior and interactions. We review the product requirements and current architecture, and work with the architect on a vertical slice implementation of the architecture.

IDesign's Virtual Architects provide you with remote access to a world-class architect to support your effort. Our architect will work on your system, becoming intimately familiar with your project and its requirements.

IDesign's Project Design service is unique in the industry, and can only be described as critical to success. Much as the need to design the system, you must also design the project: from scheduling resources behind the services, to tracking your progress across developers, services and phases of completion, to validating your plan. Addressing these challenges is a hard-core engineering task – designing the project. IDesign will help you produce not one project plan, but several plans representing different project design options. Each option is a structured, comprehensive and objective combination of schedule, cost, and risk. We will help you present these options to management and even recommend the best project design option.

Sadly, the result of not investing enough in architecture or project design is often the need to recover a project. Simply put, Software Project Recovery is a rescue effort to save the project, setting the project again on credible schedule budget and quality. Project recovery is a limited period of time of strong intervention and decisive actions to deliver on a new date and scope, to restore trust and avoid the crisis again in the future. Over the years we gained critical experience in leading successful project recovery efforts rescuing projects in distress.

Our Keynote Address service offers perspective and insight that can light up your event. The keynote is sure to entice and inspire your audience, often motivating them into rethinking many aspects of their projects and careers.

Testimonials

At Kinitos we required validation of our architecture and audit of our security mechanisms. ...read more IDesign provided us with world-class expertise in both architecture and security. IDesign were not only great consultants, but also great mentors as well. IDesign helped us design world-class security architecture in a matter of days and left us with the expertise to continue on our own afterwards.

Steven Woods , CEO

Our division had an important and aggressive deadline, and to meet it, we needed to architect, design, build and test a new architecture that would interact with our complex legacy framework. ...read more The design was required to compensate for the technology gap, encapsulate the legacy side, and provide the new common interfaces. Juval took care of all requirements and did it at 75% of the allocated hours in the purchase order and beat the assigned schedule. He gave sound advice on services related to the project and spent a holiday weekend assisting the project. Juval came up with creative ideas, such as ways of converting legacy events to loosely coupled events, and then implemented them. Juval also assisted other engineers in the division with their technology and architecture-related issues, and provided feedback on our overall architecture.

Marcus Pelletier , Staff Software Engineer

We engaged IDesign for architecture consulting contract and Virtual Architect support to help me build our Architecture process. ...read more After a wee-long engagement to create our Architecture, Monty and I started putting together a repeatable process starting at the framework. If you can convince management to bring IDesign on, please do so! It will leap you forward years ahead of where you would be without them. Currently we are implementing the architecture proposed by IDesign and building our Architecture process with a single team. We are close to releasing the process and framework to other teams so we can normalize the Developer Experience at Mindbody. We were on schedule and on budget due to the combination of solid architecture and project design. In the end, I went from an unscalable and stressed-out Architect to a happy and scalable Architect.

John Phillips , Senior Software Architect

The Workers Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California embarked on a complex migrating of the old mainframe systems to the new . ...read moreNET technologies. Our business analysts already spent thousands of hours working on business modeling and requirements. Is it even humanly possible to understand all of them and to generalize them enough to create common architectural patterns? The answer is “YES”. In the first two days IDesign worked primarily with Business Analysts. By the end of the second day they were able to identify major patterns of the system and started working with our engineers on static diagrams. By the third day we were into the system architecture. The fourth and fifth days were intense as they get writing a lot of code and verifying different architecture options for the subsystems. We covered miles of space including architecture, technologies, process boundaries and distributed transactions, authentication and authorization and security mechanisms, smart clients, web clients, multithreading, queued services, dynamic factory interfaces, and the list goes on. We asked thousands of questions. The session turned out to be an incredible experience. It was like learning to play chess by the Champion of the World. If you start on a complex project speak to the IDesign architects first. You will get an immense value from their insight as well replace classic mistakes of large system design with best practices.

Alan Tatourian , Software Engineer

Our company was developing a very large service-oriented, WCF-based distributed banking management application. ...read more The week spent with IDesign was a very valuable experience for our team. In an intense and focused engagement we managed to tackle the important issues for our project, to leverage the new Microsoft technologies and to apply a number of architectural patterns to our concrete requirements. The amount of knowledge and insight we gained during this week is something we are going to remember for the rest of our professional careers.

Aleksandar Milošević , Product Line Manager

IDesign’s week long Architectural Consulting engagement was an incredibly productive exercise for my company. ...read more From a business stand point, the process gave our architecture an enormous leap forward. We, literally, could have spent years learning from trial and error how to properly put together a large WCF-based system. Instead we spent a week being guided by IDesign, the experts in the field. That kind of opportunity is priceless for any company.

Geoff Heeren , Software Engineer

We engaged IDesign for architecture consulting contract and Virtual Architect support to help me build our Architecture process. ...read more After a weeklong engagement to create our Architecture, Monty and I started putting together a repeatable process starting at the framework. If you can convince management to bring IDesign on, please do so! It will leap you forward years ahead of where you would be without them. Currently we are implementing the architecture proposed by IDesign and building our Architecture process with a single team. We are close to releasing the process and framework to other teams so we can normalize the Developer Experience at Mindbody. We were on schedule and on budget due to the combination of solid architecture and project design. In the end, I went from an unscalable and stressed out Architect to a happy and scalable Architect.

John Phillips , Senior Software Architect