Mentoring consultancy with Bentley Motors
The Background
Bentley Motors manufactures luxury sports touring cars. They are investing £500
million and now have one of the most advanced production lines in the world, fulfilling
orders for the super-successful Continental GT.
Bentley employs over 1000 people at their world-wide headquarters in Crewe, UK.
Located here are the development teams - IT professionals who are very proud to
be helping to produce such beautiful vehicles.
The Project
Following careful analysis, the team decided to move to .NET as their development
platform. R.E., who project managed this transition, took the decision to proceed
with expert support, rather than just 'rushing-in' and potentially comprimising
important foundations to the architecture and platform. Several Web projects were
due to be written in ASP.NET, including writing new corporate procedures based on
industry best practice and another project which involved upgrading from an Access
database to SQL server and .NET architecture.
The Six-Step Process in Action
Storm Software's consultant Russell Lewis was involved with several stages of this
project, which was very well defined by the team at Bentley, and started with a
one day workshop introducing ASP.NET and bringing everyone up-to speed on the platform
and development tools. According to Russ "One very appealing factor of working with
the team at Bentley was that they included developers from a variety of programming
backgrounds as well as network and deployment experts."
Then, following formal training provided through Learning Tree International,
and allowing the developers some time to get started on their projects, Russ was
invited to follow-up with some mentoring sessions. This took the format of one-on-ones
and also group presentations to consolidate the learning.
Benefits
The mentoring sessions allowed us to link topics that were covered during training
with the practical side of real-world development and proved hugely valuable. Knowing
that they were going to be able to ask questions, each developer had prepared a
list of questions. This helped them greatly as they knew it was OK to flag something
which was causing problems as TODO, and just carry-on working, knowing they would
return to that item with the consultant. In reviewing their code, the consultant
was able to solve several problems and offer suggestions to improve design and re-usability.
Finally, many of the key points
learned during each session were presented back to the development team so they
could all benefit. Other aspects of the project and project management were also
discussed and the team congratulated on its excellent progress with this new technology.
Conclusion
Storm Software received this very positive feedback from Bentley: "The calm, coherent
and constructive approach you had to those busy, detailed sessions, made the process
extremely productive and everyone was able to benefit from your very significant
expertise as well as each of our own experiences. Everyone agreed that it had all
been invaluable."