What Are Mountain Guide Services?

We Summit Mountains offers Mountain Guide Services for clients in need of development, consultation, or administrative services for their Salesforce ORG and proximal software needs. They are designed to be flexible to your needs while remaining effective in development cycles.

No Long Term Contract

Mountain Guide Services are not a long term contract, they are a "pay as you go" service. Each month you will purchase a number of hours. For the cost of those hours, we will meet or exceed your expectations for quality service, or else you can choose to discontinue at any time.

We pride ourselves in client retention by providing exceptional service without long term contracts or large up-front payment schemes.

Mountain Guide Services Help Drive Project Success

All of us have different needs as individuals. Each company has varying needs as well. Mountain Guide Services is built to be flexible. Our consultants have seen many implementations, and have learned how to drive success across different implementations. We focus on the end goal: providing value. We will guide you throughout the process on how to determine what the highest priority items are, how to accomplish those items, and how those items might impact the success of the project.

How do we use the hours?

These hours are consumable through working session calls, training, documentation, solution design, development, or any other agreed on consultation proximal to software or Salesforce implementation. Hour usage will be discussed and approved by the client before the consumption of hours.

Each month hours can be purchased based on the development needs for that month. We Summit Mountains will work to consume those hours to deliver what you as the client has agreed on as priority for those hours. This is a very simple process:

You purchase 30 hours of development for a month.
We discuss prioritization of your tasks you want to spend the hours for that month on.
We consume the hours while solutioning, developing, demoing, training, or any other work regarding the tasks prioritized and agreed on.

What happens if we need more hours?

Good relationships are formed on good communication. We will communicate with all decision makers and get explicit permission before going over the budgeted hours for a month.

If more hours are needed to move at a specific speed, or meet a particular timeline, and we have the capacity to meet those overage hours, we will be happy to go over. Overage hours are invoiced on next month's invoice.

What happens if we do not use all of the hours?

The first thing to note is that we will provide exceptional project management. We will estimate time to completion for each task. If we do not think that there will be enough tasks to use the hours for that month, we will discuss all options with you.

We will not let underutilization sneak up on us.

The Mountain Guide Services Process

We Summit Mountains uses what we believe to be the best parts of agile-like methodology for the sprints consuming the hours purchased.

Step 1: Discovery and Prioritization

At the beginning of each "sprint", we will discuss new tasks that are needed, and add estimated hours to them. We will review the Summit Prioritization Log and compare them to existing tasks. If any reprioritization needs to occur, we can do that at that time.

Step 2: Development

Development should be consistent and continuous throughout each sprint. Depending on the size and complexity of the tasks, it may take more than one weekly meeting for demonstration of that task. In this case, we will give updates on where we are at in the development of that task. Do note that we take pride in our efficiency at delivery. We move fast as there is always more to do. We succeed when you succeed.

Step 3: Demo / Training

Once we are ready, we will demo a feature built in our next call with the interested stakeholders. During this point we will train all interested stakeholders in the use of the feature. From there we will ask for the feature to be tested by the end user as they would normally use it (we will smoke test it for errors, your testing is for acceptance.)

Step 4: Feedback Interval Training

After client testing, we look forward to the feedback phase. This is where all interested parties in a particular feature discuss things they like, things they might not like. We will listen to the feedback and make changes where necessary.

What is Feedback Interval Training?

Feedback Interval Training (FIT) is a process of user testing loosely based off of UAT, but tailored to the declarative and self documenting nature of current cloud based solutions.

Why User Acceptance Testing needs Improvement

Coded development systems have been around since the 80s. In the 80s, a software developer worked with all code environments. The people requesting new features did not know how to code, or how to even describe what they wanted from software. User Acceptance Testing started with User Scripts which were long drawn out lists of "When a user does x, the software should do y". Developers would code solutions that met those descriptive test scripts, but often without a deep understanding of the client's needs.

Since the 80s, two important things have changed.

Development tools have improved. Most development no longer requires a full code environment.
Almost everyone uses software all day long every day.

This means that the end user has grown better at effectively describing what they need, while developers have much more examples of good UI and tools to use as reference when discussing development needs.

However, many management roles at consulting firms are held by old school developers often hesitant to leave behind methodologies that worked during their coding days. This leaves many consulting firms stuck in UAT structures which waste time and provide little value to the process.

How does FIT fix these issues?

FIT is a new methodology that takes into account the improvements to development present in modern tools.

Discussion of Needs: Instead of discussing user stories, we discuss needs. Someone has a need that software can fulfill, and we describe how software can fulfill that need. Instead of rigorous discussion of testing scripts which takes many many hours of tedious work on both sides, we instead have a discussion to make sure that We Summit Mountains understands your needs as the client.
Minimal Viable Product Demo and Test: We will develop using the most effective, and long term scalable tools to build out a tool that meets your needs. After this demo, we will provide a safe environment for you to test this newly developed feature.
Feedback Implementation: Nothing is perfect on the first iteration. Not even with lengthy user testing script requirements. We look forward to hearing how we can improve a feature, and will make any changes needed as quickly as possible.

Why are we so confident in this process?

The short answer is, we have been developing in Salesforce for a long time. We have seen many methodologies across many consulting firms, and have the bravery to experiment. We have been using the FIT methodology for years, and it has proven to be far more quick and effective than old school UAT, and we are proud to be frontrunners of this process.

Understand the difference between Managed Services and fixed quote development.

Mountain Guide - Managed Services Vs. Fixed Scope Development

Why Fixed Scope Quoting Sucks