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Special Project


Do you have a burning idea for a project? Perhaps it’s something you believe will give your company a strategic edge. It could be an idea passed down from corporate leadership or pressed upon you by one of your clients. Maybe there’s a need to create something to fix a nagging annoyance in your existing environment.


Whatever its source, if your IT department doesn’t have the resources to turn the vision into reality, you may have the perfect scenario for having a solutions engineer take on the project.

Social Solutions, a case management and performance analytics SaaS provider in the human services field, and Monster.com, a leading job search site, partnered to provide the State of Washington’s Employment Security Division with an integrated job matching system. I was brought on to architect and develop the tooling to move Washington ESD’s data into the new platform. In addition to creating the migration import engine, I served as senior technical mentor and assisted with technical project management on the data mapping and transformation team.

Go-To Relationship

Do you need a “go-to” developer and database resource? Programming, business intelligence and data projects come up, but perhaps not frequently enough to justify expanding your IT team to include a full-time employee for these tasks. In fact, many of the projects may be so small that they hardly feel worthy of the title “project.” Finding a consultant each time one of these projects presents itself may not be viable because of the effort involved in locating the right resource, negotiating a contract, bringing the new individual up to speed, etc.

 

A standing relationship with a solutions engineer might be the perfect solution, providing you with a low-friction means of quickly and easily handing off projects as they come up to a trusted and skilled resource who has growing relationships with your team and an understanding of your environment.

Harvest House Publishers, a top-ten publisher of Christian books, needed a go-to programming and data resource to help them with the normal flow of micro- to medium-sized projects that a non-technology company finds itself wanting to do on a regular basis. Establishing a relationship allowed Harvest to easily hand these projects to me, whether they were something simple like creating a report or more complex like connecting their internal publications management system with a SaaS metadata distribution solution.

Long-Term Augmentation

Do you have a standing need that’s not large enough to justify a full-time position? Squeezing existing team members, who don’t have extra time and may not have the necessary skills, to somehow fill this need may seem like the only option to get done what needs to be done.

 

An alternative is to engage a solutions engineer, offloading the pressure from your team so that they can work efficiently on existing assignments without being overloaded, avoiding burnout and the drop in quality that often occurs when resources are stretched thin.

Through internal restructuring, an IT group at Chesapeake Energy, a Fortune 500 natural gas producer, found itself owning a reporting environment and its backing data store. The team didn’t have the business intelligence and database skills to handle data store maintenance and new report development, yet the environment’s needs weren’t large enough to justify adding a full-time position to take them on. The team requested that I take ownership of the environment, staffing it on a regular but part-time basis. This enabled the IT group to stay focused on their primary objectives while ensuring that the environment was taken care of.

Sound like what you’re looking for? Have questions?

Let’s get in touch! You can reach me at ben@bengribaudo.com.

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You can learn about what the title Solutions Engineer means by visiting About Me.

All services provided through Ben Gribaudo, LLC.