Advanced Process Designs

Welcome and thanks for dropping by!

You are likely here because one of our customers pointed you this way and we appreciate that. Since 2003 all of our projects have been through referrals – we have never advertised.  All of our customers are important to us and we have developed lasting relationships over the years. We truly enjoy every project and are totally committed to its success. Maybe one day we will need to focus on marketing but with everyone’s continued help that will not be today.

If you would like to discuss your project please ask one of our customers for our contact information and let us discuss if there is any way we can help you with your goals.

Bill Quintrell, President
Advanced Process Designs

Our Story

As our name implies we are all about Process.  I have architected large systems and directed development and operations teams for 30 years and I have learned that your process must constantly change as your project transitions from stage to stage. At this point the process transitions are well known, should be anticipated and these process transitions should be implemented in a way that they are both organic and aggressive. This is where we come in.

Why are we so successful at what we do?

We have a small team of experts with years of experience and projects focusing on Risk Management, Scale and development/testing/release/operations lifecycles.  Some projects are totally green field. Many included live migrations of millions and millions of binary objects which seems to have become a niche for us.

This always comes up so to level set, yes, we are well versed in the Big Three…

Yes, we always consider Risk Management:

-          Hard constraints like contract deadlines

-          Financial/investor requirements

-          Legal/privacy/licensing/security of data

-          Hitting narrow market windows-of-opportunity

-          New systems that required new, totally unproven architectures

-          Project Team staffing – do I have the right people at each stage of delivery? How do I transition to a steady state staffing plan?

-          Migration of existing data with challenges due to quantity of data, size of objects, accuracy of migration, no downtime for the cutover and change-concurrency issues.

-          Simply put, ‘Our customers and dealers will not tolerate another bad experience – this transition MUST go smoothly!’

Yes, we are comfortable working at scale:

-          Quantity or size of migrated or seeded data. Massive data translations or conversions.

-          Quantity or size of final stored data under management. All aspects of legal/technical document retention rules.

-          Transactions per second be those http, database CloudFront, network or memcache (or even ftp!) transactions

-          Dynamic server farm scaling by hour or day, day of week, month end or new customer onboarding

-          Scaling impact to Disaster Recovery and High Availability scenarios

-          External vendor services and their ability to scale with you

-          Finally, internal team staffing scale issues as you try to resist new development scaling down too much while operations/overhead beings to scale up more than expected

And Yes, we understand the timing and how project values and system focus begins to transition:

-          From ‘All hands on deck’ development

-          To ‘Just get it running’

-          To ‘Make it reliable’ (HA, monitoring, alerting, scalability, DR…)

-          To ‘I need more data of about the system to manage my business’ (Reporting can tell me what happened and how I missed it. Business alerting will wake me up as it beings to happen.)

-          To ‘Minimize my costs - I can’t freeze the system. I need a rapid, low risk change process and low cost operations’

With Risk Management, all-things-at-scale and a constant state of transition we can now talk about why our customers hire us and keep us around: Creating amazing processes
The art in what we do is in knowing how to take a huge list of goals, values and risks and take them all into account when defining the process. And remember, what was true when I started 30 years ago is still true today: You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Everyone has their technical teams which are confident they can handle all the technical application development details. And many can. However developers and managers are rarely adept at remediating all the business risks while adjusting the staffing mix all while the project is in motion transitioning from a development project to a live system in constant need of adapting to new business requirements. Frankly, this is our sweet spot.

Fair warning: Many people use Agile-like processes and we understand why – at its root it has typically been adopted to overcome present organizational or culture challenges. It does help and it does work. However, our vision and emphasis is to help you use products (like JIRA et al) to establish many, mini discreet factories creating ‘parts’ which constantly feed sophisticated, real time testing and release management processes. With this approach you can scale your staffing and technical focus up/down as your timelines and budget dictate.  Our technology does not require sprints. Sprints tend to appear because of other process problems and businesses do not naturally operate in sprints so why impose them if you don’t have to? Business challenges do not come bundled in 2-week sprints and customers do not expect 2-week sprints so why would we build processes that have built-in delays if we can be presented with a better choice? With the low cost technologies available today our IT delivery processes should be more like managing a dynamic forest of change rather than constantly constructing unique 2- or 4-week sow, plough and harvest cycles.

 

My Three Prevailing Principles form the foundation

Simply put development/delivery/operations process methodologies are meant to deliver on 3 prevailing principles upon which you build your internal IT business:

1.       Ensure your teams can deliver feature/function as quickly as any other available provider

2.       Ensure your system is reliable (availability, DR, security, data retention/privacy, legal standards…)

3.       Ensure your total cost is as good as any other option (staffing, hosting, network/communications, vendors…)

We believe every business should adopt these foundational principles and values which enable their projects to repeatedly 1) respond quickly to new business needs, 2) produce reliable systems and 3) operate at a cost structure that is better than any other option. This is what APD is all about.

So please contact me. Even if your budget and timing prevents us from working together at this time I truly enjoy hearing about your projects and technology delivery challenges and would like to help in any way I can.

Bill