Services

Technology consulting for finance

Technology Strategy

We can provide recommendations for technology strategy based on your needs. We focus on using the right technologies for your needs, not just the hottest ones. We will emphasize recommendations that will create systems that will last for years and be flexible as your needs change. Our 20 years of experience with the best firms in finance will inform our deliberations. We have learned how small differences in requirements or unexpected changes in the business can be handled easily with one design, and can paralyze another. A good technology strategy can make all the difference.

Software Development

We can provide in-house or off-site consultants to implement your software development needs. The challenges of off-site consultants are many, but can be mitigated with a team that knows how to integrate with the in-house developers and technology staff. In either case, our developers are selected specifically for you and are trained by ATG to ensure efficient, solid code. We have learned that developers, even with an excellent strategy to implement and good requirements must still make hundreds of small decisions each day. Those decisions can result in code that is extensible and flexible as needs change, or it can result in inflexible code that requires rewrites and refactors as the years go on. We make sure our developers think about the next developers that must use their code, and the business as it changes and grows.

It is also important that developers, who have to make so many small decisions each day, have a good understanding of the industry and the client's specific business. The decision to make code more generic or more specific cannot be made without the complete context. That context includes both the technology and the business. The developers will make better long term decisions if they understand and work as closely as possible with the business.

Business Analysis

Our Business Analysts walk easily between the worlds of finance and technology. It is important for the BA team to always keep both the needs of the clients on the business side and the needs of the developers in mind. Often they will have competing opinions, and it is up to the BA to merge those opinions into a plan as soon as possible in the process. To minimize these conflicts, it is also important to have developers understand the business as we described above. To achieve the same level of understanding from the business side, it is up to the BA to educate the business users, if needed, on technology considerations, so that they can keep those in mind as they make requests. The BA is a teacher, a negotiator, an organizer and a writer.

Quality Assurance

Our philosophy on QA is that the Quality Assurance team should be involved at the beginning of the development process as well as at the end. Business Analysts and developers have many priorities to weigh as they plan an item for development. It is easy for them to short-cut the process of covering edge cases and creating enough detailed step-by-step use cases. By including the QA professional in that process early, you have a team member whose main job is to think of edge cases and create the detailed steps of the use cases. And that same QA professional has an incentive to get those edge cases covered in the specs, because he or she will be the one to stumble on the uncovered edge case if it is not covered in the specs. If they were there at the beginning of the process with the job of imagining the edge cases, they will not want to think of those cases after the fact. Without the QA team involved at the beginning, too many times QA teams will discover edge cases in their testing process developers and BAs never considered.

Production Support

Production Support professionals combine many of the roles above. We provide production support professionals who know how to communicate with our clients' employees in a professional manner that respects their accomplishments. At the same time, they will know the business well enough, and the software well enough, that they will gain the respect of the users of the systems. They will also understand some of the skills of the QA team, so that when questions arise from the users, they can create reliable repro steps to describe the problem found, in a way that the developers can follow. They will also know how to write technology stories, so that when requests come in from the users, they can ask the right questions, and pass enough information on to the Business Analysts that they can get started on the project.