Time and Cost Management
Like home building, software development is notorious for going over budget in terms of both time and money. Working closely with customers and our own CFO, David Quinn-Jacobs has developed a number of large and small scale applications, always on time, and generally within budget. Since our customers are integral to our rapid prototyping approach, they are always aware of the status of a project, and never surprised by the results. If requirements change, due to "creep", customers are immediately aware of the change and the ramifications.
People Management
With large companies your project may get assigned a group of people, some of whom just "put their time in" for something to fill in their time card. Authentrics is small enough that we can pick the right person for any given aspect of a project. Having worked for a number of years with each person on the team, David knows and plays to their individual strengths. Each is actively involved in the project, working on it because of his or her interest in seeing it through to completion. That, rather than bean-counting, is the key to succesful project management.
Two Ideal Projects
Two projects in particular stand out as examples of the success of the Authentrics approach to managing software development efforts: StudyPharm and GraphWise. StudyPharm was an in-house project that we developed over a period of two years, working together to create an ideal design and implementation of a clinical trials management system. After developing the app, we started using StudyPharm to host clinical trials on our server farm. Soon after, the product was acquired by a larger firm (eTrials Worldwide, now Merge Healthcare). It is currently managing a large number of studies, supporting thousands of clinicians and their patients around the world.
The same team of developers worked on a project for GraphWise, LLC. We developed a search engine that seeks out, recognizes, normalizes and indexes tabular data on a network (e.g., the internet). Several patents have been filed from our work on this project. GraphWise is still under development; it is targeting in-house enterprise networks.
Distributed, Hand-Picked Teams
The Authentrics team is a geographically distributed group, located around the continental United Sates. The members assigned to your project are selected because they are interested and have the appropriate skills. We use tools like Skype, AIM, iChat and GoToMeeting to stay in touch with each other and with our stakeholders. We travel when necessary, but can save our customers significant costs by teleconferencing.