Posts on Bespoke Software

SkillsLogic and Musgrave Analytics have designed and developed the NHS Providers new web based data collection and analysis system. This new web based system makes it easier for NHS Providers to catalog, analyse and then report on the data they collect from their members.

Our Sheffield software development team is busy with new work and we're now recruiting again.

We have a vacancy for a PHP web application developer.

We're looking for good analyst developers who have strong PHP skills - our ideal candidate is someone who's comfortable working directly with clients and who's got a track record of web application development with PHP & MySql or PostgreSQL.

Please get in touch if you're interested. We're easy to find in the centre of town and we're always happy to meet people informally for a chat about what we do and the kinds of roles we have available.

In the past I’ve always planned software development projects with Microsoft Project - but only for producing nice Gantt charts to show tasks and the dependencies between them and never really for resource planning (I always found it over complicated).

If you got a nasty tummy bug back in the Spring then there is a pretty good chance that it was caused by a bacteria called Campylobacter. In 2010 there were more than 700,000 cases in the UK and it costs the UK more than £600m a year - that's more than Salmonella, Listeria and E.Coli combined. Campylobacter kills around 200 people a year.

What's the difference between ‘waterfall' and ‘agile' software development? And why should you care if you're thinking about buying or commissioning some bespoke software?

Another article about recruitment, data and HR, this time at Google:

How Google became such a great place to work

The Google HR department - or People Operations (POPS for short) - collects and analyses data about employee behaviour and job satisfaction, everything from optimal lunch queue size to the shape of tables in the cafeteria (long narrow tables encourage people who don't know each other to talk together).

I read a couple of articles this week about data mining and recruitment. There are companies that mine large amounts of recruitment data, do some analysis and then discover interesting things.

For example, recruiters typically don't want to employ people with criminal records but it turns out that the data suggests that in customer call centres at least, the people with criminal records perform better. Another one was staff who apply for jobs online - the data suggests that applicants who've installed alternative browsers - Chrome or Firefox - perform better than their colleagues who still use Internet Explorer.

We're pleased to announce the release of clickLearner - a new kind of video based e-learning and assessment solution that SkillsLogic have developed for the Sheffield based company of the same name.

We're just about to start a new bespoke LMS project and it's got me thinking again about the right way to start any reasonably sized project. Prince2 calls it Project Initiation and in Prince2 the Project Initiation Document (PID) is a collection of documents that typically covers: