JAC2 Consultancy currently employs two full time members of staff and utilises other Delphi and Interbase/Firebird experts as the need arises.

The company first started out as "Jason Chapman Consultancy" six months after I left university in 1990.

I joined FMI in 1995 for two years, during which time I led the Borland team. I still remained active with the Borland/Interbase community and presenting at UK BUG events.

When I left FMI in 1997 I carried on consultancy and developing freelance for companies such as Thomson Marconi, Baines & Ernst and Precia Molem to name a few.

In 1998, I was asked by Borland to help a company in Manchester which was having performance issues with Interbase. I was commissioned to do 3 days consultation, which turned into running their IT department. At this point I employed Jan to take on JAC2 Consultancy’s other work commitments, but I still remained active with JAC2 work and in the development community.

I stayed with Baines and Ernst for 3 years and eventually became their IT director, where I gained valuable experience working for larger companies and running very large projects.

After 3 years I decided I would like to concentrate more on my commitments to JAC2 Consultancy.

The key to all of the work that JAC2 undertakes is flexibility, quality and after sales care.

Even though we have distinguished between the disciplines below, we find that most of our ongoing work takes on a little of all of them.

Training

We run courses that are customised to the client’s specific requirements. I.e. they don’t tend to follow the normal routine of courses but are tailored to fit in with current projects being developed by a company.

Our experiences in Client Server Development have meant that most of the courses we have taught revolve around that subject matter.

We try to draw from specific problems and examples in the client’s problem domain and feel this speeds the learning process and may result in ideas and techniques that can be plugged straight into their everyday developments.

We advise that longer courses be split into two-day sessions, with the delegates getting at least 3 working days between sessions. I feel that this enables the best rate of assimilation. Splitting a five-day course into 2 sessions produces much better results.

Course titles are a little irrelevant as we build the course round your specific needs, but here are typical courses:

Mentoring

A more project specific training, where the skills of the individual are being improved during the normal project lifecycle. Typically this involves a consultant being included as part of a development team, visiting for two days a month to monitor progress, give advice, guidance and formally QA work. This can be very effective in ongoing projects where time is of a premium and productivity must not be lost on training courses.

We can offer mentoring during any or all phases of the development lifecycle.

Consultancy

If your company has the in house skills required to solve a business problem, but feel exposed or at risk through a lack of broad knowledge of possible solutions, having a third party come and look at the problem, suggesting the right direction through a combination of our services and other resources, can produce extremely good result.

System Design

Architecting good systems is not an easy skill to master - we find that most developers start implementing systems before they have given enough thought about the design. This technique works for relatively small projects, but does not scale up to large projects very well. Having assistance in the design phase can pay dividends during the development of a project.

Development

We can take projects right from the analysis phase through to delivery and support. Delivering systems in increments means that the customer receives the system they want and can monitor progress and become part of the project development. Projects range from a day (e.g. Oracle replication to Laptops and Delphi) to multi-man year projects (Pensions administration system).

Support

We always provide support for any of the services or products we help produce. This can either take the form of pay as you use, or fixed price support. After training courses we will answer e-mail regarding problems our delegates are having with their development.