Robert Melton

My focus as a consultant is to Work the Problem. It is what I love to do, solve problems. In order for me to focus on this, I have worked at making the rest of the business of consulting hassle free. Hassle free consulting means straightforward pricing, easy billing, realism and preparedness.

Once the groundwork and expectations are in place, we can start to process of Working the Problem, regardless of if that problem is scaling your application to 10,000 requests per second or just creating a site to market your real estate properties.

1. Define the problem
2. Gather data (research problem)
3. Determine the underlying/root problems
4. Evaluate multiple possible solutions
5. Implement solution
6. Verify solution

I don't expect my clients to know exactly what they want, but to have a general idea of where they want to go. What I do assume is that you want something, are willing to work together to define the goal, even if I end up doing most of the research. This is part of why I don't do firm fixed price contracts.

Being prepared means having both the experience and tools on-hand to solve the client problem. In order to facilate easy project startup I keep up to date on hundreds of technologies, and am ready to get started right away. Regardless of if you are developing WCF/MsSQL application on IIS7 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and doing your source control with Subversion, or you are building a PHP/MySQL application, proxied through apache, running on Litespeed managed via Git(hub) I am ready to get started helping you the same day, I have servers and software in place and waiting.

Even if your project is using Google AppEngine or Amazon EC2, I have standing accounts with both and I am ready to start working the same day.