My PCA Project Design & Development Team?

Every PCA Client is assigned a Project Manager (PM) who is responsible for leading you through each step of our standard design-build process.  The PM is your primary day-to-day contact at PCA to coordinate Project planning and execution.  Client teams are also comprised of a Principal Engineer who directs PCA engineering resources, and Staff Engineers who are assigned to your Project.

Your PM and Principal Engineer remain constant throughout the entire Project.  Staff engineers may change from time to time, depending upon the resources required and specific technical needs of your application E.g. design, architecture, security, report development, etc.

No.   PCA does not outsource any aspect of our design process or development tasks — every service is performed by full-time PCA software engineering professionals.

You do.   PCA Smart Client applications are owned by our Clients, and are license-free and royalty-free.  The cost is the same whether you have 5 users or 500 users.  We utilize a generic webservice and component library built on Microsoft technologies to make all of our Smart Client applications highly functional, standardized and scalable, and this component is proprietary to PCA.

Feature creep aka Scope creep is a term used to describe a software Project that over-emphasizes new, additional features at the expense of simplicity, stability, cost, and/or schedules.   PCA takes a disciplined approach to constraining Project scope. Our consultants will challenge you to separate must-haves from nice-to-haves — with the objective of determining the smallest possible set of application capabilities that are necessary to meet your minimum, essential business needs.  It oftentimes makes more sense to defer a new capability to keep the Project budget and schedule on track.

In addition to resulting in a more manageable Project budget and schedule, this keep-it-simple approach results in a more manageable budget and schedule, allows PCA to focus on building a strong foundation of known application essentials, and avoids reinvesting in items that are likely to change as the new application evolves and takes shape.

PCA anticipates a certain level of changes and refinements throughout the design/development process, and this is factored into our Project estimates.  Project budgets and schedules can however be adversely impacted by requests for new substantial items or extensive changes to existing capabilities, especially when the timing of a significant change request occurs late in the development process.  Significant changes become increasingly expensive the further we get into application Development.