Professional Services and Areas of Expertise

Tom's experience ranges in multiple areas when it comes to developing complex software solutions. He has multiple years of experience and can apply his skills in the following areas to achieve your goals.

Business Analysis

Perform a comprehensive analysis of business requirements, assess the current state of your applications and systems and identify gaps in functionality, design and architecture. Create an execution plan to achieve your business goals based on the results of this analysis.

Requirements Gathering and Refinement

Gather, define, clarify, and document business requirements to ensure alignment with technical solutions. Identify stakeholder needs and expectations, and create a clear and concise list of requirements. Identify gaps and ensure that the final product meets the needs of the business. Refine and clarify the requirements for use as input into the backlog, user stories, and technical specifications.

UX & UI Design

A seamless and intuitive User Experience is crucial to deliver value to users while meeting all business requirements. It is a challenging task to achieve, but essential. Develop UI wireframes, define information architecture, create data flow diagrams, and design an end-to-end user interface for mobile and desktop devices that clearly define user interactions with the system.

Architecture & Technical Design

Design a scalable, secure, and maintainable system with suitable abstractions and interfaces that meets the business requirements. Determine the optimal architecture to achieve this and decompose domain requirements into front-end, backend, and storage components. Ensure that technical designs are robust, testable, and flexible enough to accommodate future requirements.

Development

Provide guidance to the development team to ensure high-quality software delivery by following agile development practices, leveraging appropriate technologies and tools for efficient functionality delivery based on business and architecture requirements, and ensuring high-quality and testable components and systems. Follow coding standards, best practices, and design principles to ensure maintainability and scalability. Conduct code reviews and implement agile processes to optimize the software development lifecycle.

Testing & Quality Assurance

Ensure that all software systems meet both functional and non-functional requirements, including performance, reliability, and security, through a comprehensive testing process. Develop a detailed test plan and incorporate testability of components into the design. Utilize automated testing tools to ensure consistency and repeatability of tests, with the ultimate aim of eliminating risk and minimizing downtime.

Deployment & Release Management

Create a smooth and efficient deployment and release management process by packaging, deploying, and releasing the software system to production while adhering to version control, change management, and rollback procedures. Utilize the latest DevOps practices and appropriate tools to automate and streamline the process for maximum efficiency.

Monitoring, Alerting & Logging

Use DevOps practices to improve monitoring and alerting, and incorporate logging into all components and applications for deeper insights. Monitoring and alerting can identify and address potential issues before they become critical and provide valuable insights into application performance and areas for improvement. Maximize availability and minimize downtime by providing guidance on system monitoring, alerting, and disaster recovery.

User Feedback

Gathering user feedback is critical to improving the application and ensuring that it meets user needs. User feedback can be collected through surveys, usability testing, and analytics tools. It can also be used to collect new requirements for new features and enhancements.

Maintenance and Operations

Well-designed systems have a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and require both corrective and adaptive maintenance to remain functional and up-to-date. Corrective maintenance focuses on identifying and fixing software issues such as bugs and errors, while adaptive maintenance involves making necessary changes to the software to ensure its relevance and usefulness to users over time. The maintenance and support phase of a software system's lifecycle is crucial and requires a robust support process that includes issue tracking, bug fixes, and security updates.

Upgrade and Modernize

Having a well-defined plan for the end-of-life and retirement of the software system is as important as having a strategy for upgrading and modernizing applications and systems. To ensure a smooth transition process and minimize risk and disruption to users, it is crucial to have a clear and detailed plan for upgrading and modernizing applications and systems. This requires a solid technical design, which can help in a smooth transition process.

Optimize & Improve Performance

Passion for Technology

I am deeply passionate about leveraging technology to solve various business challenges and enjoy exploring new business domains. The ability to automate repetitive tasks can free up time and resources to focus on more important and creative endeavors. It's always exciting to explore new business domains and learn about new ventures, and I agree that automation can play a crucial role in making them more efficient and manageable. However, it's important to remember that not everyone may have the technical expertise to fully utilize technology, which is why it's important to design solutions that are user-friendly and accessible to non-technical users. Ultimately, technology should serve to make our lives simpler and more efficient, and it's up to us to ensure that it does just that.

I strongly believe that entrepreneurs and business owners should focus on their core competencies and leave the technological aspects to the experts. Technology should serve as a tool to assist them in managing their inventory, logistics, scheduling, planning, accounting, and many other aspects of their business. It should not be a burden or overly complicated for them. This is where I can help, by providing my expertise to make their technological needs easier to manage and more efficient.

With my technical expertise, I can efficiently create a blueprint of how technology can improve your business processes. After evaluating your requirements, I will provide recommendations, and you can prioritize which ones are most essential for your business. If you're a software company seeking to enhance and optimize specific workflow processes, I can assist with that. Having shipped and released several products, I have experience working with small and large teams, as well as working independently and managing teams. However, I find it surprising that planning, tracking, and designing dependable solutions is still a significant challenge.

I agree that having a clear vision and end goal is crucial for a team's success. Without a well-defined objective, it's difficult to prioritize tasks and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal. As a technical expert, I can work with you to define and clarify your business objectives and then develop a roadmap for achieving those goals. This will help to ensure that everyone on the team is aligned and working towards the same vision, which will ultimately lead to a more successful project outcome.

My approach to software development is not necessarily unique, as I rely on established frameworks and the software development lifecycle. However, my years of experience have given me a deep understanding of how to quickly generate clear and concise requirements, including detailed UX/UI flows. I am confident that I can outperform even experienced product managers and VPs of engineering when it comes to delivering high-quality requirements and technical specifications. By eliminating ambiguity and providing detailed technical designs, I can help ensure efficient engineering and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for your project.

A Few Random Questions Before We Start

Are the project requirements clearly defined and documented?
Have you identified and documented the specific business requirements for this project?
Do you have a clear understanding of the problem we are trying to solve for our users?
Have you created user personas to represent our target audience?
Have you developed a user flow that outlines the steps users will take to accomplish their goals?
Have you created wireframes or prototypes to illustrate how our system will look and function?
Have you identified and prioritized the needs and goals of our users?
Have you incorporated feedback from stakeholders throughout the design process?
Have you incorporated feedback from users to ensure we are meeting their needs?
Does the team have a clear understanding of the project goals and objectives?
Is the team using an agile development process that emphasizes flexibility and iterative development?
Is the team using source control to manage code changes and ensure code quality?
Is the team using automated tests to ensure high qulity for each release?
Does the team have the necessary technical expertise to complete the project successfully?
Are you using a scalable and secure architecture that can handle future growth and changes?
Is the team communicating effectively and regularly with stakeholders and potentialy with customers?
Is the team using data-driven decision making to guide project decisions and prioritize tasks?
Is the team focused on delivering high-quality software that meets user needs and expectations?
Have you defined a consistent visual design language for our system?
Have you considered accessibility requirements for our users with disabilities?
Is your Backlog prioritized and each User Story clearly defined?
Does everyone undertand their role and accountabilities?
Do you have a robust and scalable architecture to allow for growth?
Do you have metrics dashboards to easily view usage and other metrics of your system and apps?
Do all your systems consistently log availability, reliability and performance metrics?
Do you instrument your components to consistently log usage metrics?
Are your components designed to be loosely coupled?
Are your components easily testable and tests run after each build?
Do you use feature flags to enable or disable functionlity in your application?
Can you perform A|B testing and Experimentation?
Can you quickly disable new features in case or errors?
Can you gradually ramp up and enable new features and monitor usages before enabling it for everyone?
Can you quickly rollback a deployment in case of errors?