Planning, process and technology.
Technology
PointyHat targets a single platform for our custom software: the web. This means that your custom application works on every device you already own, and will work on any device you purchase in the future. So whether you’re in a hotel room in Hong Kong or a conference room in Toronto, you can enjoy immediate access to your company’s most vital information.
Each member of your team is empowered to collaborate from any device at any location, allowing you to execute on every detail of your organization in real-time. And with a custom solution tailored specifically to your company, you’ll be amazed how much gets done without you logging in at all.
This will completely eliminate the burden you face when forced to maintain your own IT infrastructure. PointyHat handles all data backups, upgrades, installs, security and maintenance issues for you 24/7 in our state-of-the-art server farms. IT should be like electricity or any other utility - pay per use and simply focus on your core business.
Process
We meet with you and your team to learn the key resources and workflows that make up your business. We break down every event that occurs throughout a typical work day into User Stories, identifying the users and actions that make up each event. For example:
- Project Manager receives Change Order from General Contractor
- Existing Client requests Estimate for a new Job
- Bookkeeper approves Employee Timesheets
- Equipment Manager assigns Resources to a Job Site
With this understanding in place, we can give you a quote on each piece of functionality and let you choose the features that are of highest priority for the first round of development.
Once we agree on the Scope of Work, we provide you with a Schedule of Deliverables and begin development of the system.
Development starts as a UI prototype of each feature you've selected. This allows you to visually identify how each module will work, and discuss the design with various members of your team. Once the prototype is approved, we wire up the database and migrate your existing data so that you can start using the system as soon as possible. This approach continues until every feature in the Scope of Work has been implemented and accepted.
After your system is deemed "Feature Complete", it moves to a production web server, and benefits from unlimited support and bug fixes for six months.
PointyHat Advantage
A typical web development shop usually struggles to integrate as many as six disparate technologies, each with their own syntax and idiosyncrasies. This causes a measurable drain on productivity due to the constant context switching required by each developer.
PointyHat develops our custom applications using the one language of the web: JavaScript. All of our UI, business logic, database code, unit tests, build scripts and system administration runs atop a unified custom framework. Because JavaScript is running everywhere, we can share code between the client and server, resulting in a greatly reduced code-base. And due to the highly flexible nature of JavaScript, we can achieve in ten lines of code what would take fifty or more in a less expressive technology.
Sitting atop powerful engines like Mozilla’s Rhino and Google’s V8, we enjoy all the above advantages while maintaining access to the rich array of existing Java libraries, and the IO efficiency of frameworks like NodeJS. And with the rich UI suite we leverage from ExtJS, our apps look and feel like the most powerful desktop software you’ve ever used.
The bottom line is that we are faster because we are simpler. And this translates into higher quality and more cost effective solutions for our clients.