Silverfox Services

Silverfox Consulting generally is engaged in large scale computer and communication systems design and development. These systems typically re-engineer a large scale process to optimize them for performance, economy or to capture an emerging market. You should not engage Silverfox Consulting if you know exactly what you want to do and are looking for a consultant to manage the project. You should engage us if you are looking for creative or unusual solutions where we can leverage our many years of product and project development experience. Silverfox can help you in the following stages of project development:

Process and Costs

While we can assist in the construction of systems, generally, our clients find that we are to expensive for component construction through system integration. During this period, we often take on a review and management role to make sure that the project plan and engineering design are followed.

We generally work via an initial consulting retainer followed up by a mutual decision (or not) for Silverfox to follow-up with a proposal. During this initial retainer period, we talk intensively with you to understand the scope of the project and the broad outline of potential solutions. We provide a written summary and a brief discussion of our evaluation of your project ideas as the result of this introductory period.

If we mutually decide that a proposal is in order, we provide an fixed price for generating a proposal. Upon your acceptance of us generating a proposal, we will proceed to generate one covering the agreed upon scope of the project. Proposals generally come in several types depending upon your needs and our assessment of your requirements.

We prefer to break our proposals into phases with the early phases specified in detail and a narrow range of associated costs; while the later phases become increasingly less detailed with wider ranges of potential costs. Costs are borne on a phased basis. The end of later phases almost invariably contain a planning, costing and approval task to continually narrow the cost estimate, increase the detail of the plan and obtain ongoing approval. This approach is advantageous because the project is continually under client review and oversight; which normally leads to the lowest overall cost. Should the need arise or the project become unnecessary, it can be expeditiously terminated in an appropriate manner. This approach has the potential dis-advantage that substantial client involvement is required. It also has the characteristic that either party can terminate the relationship upon completion of each phase.

We can also provide fixed price proposals for project development. We prefer not to do this because we must make provisions for every contingency and this drives up costs. A fixed price contract request often indicates that the client already has a very detailed idea of the solution and its cost and is looking for execution assistance. We generally avoid projects with these characteristics. However, fixed price contracts usually result in large profits so we are happy to provide them.

We can also provide time and materials consulting. This effectively keeps us on retainer for a longer period than to come to a conclusion about initiating a project. Costs here are higher for short assignments and get lower for longer term assignments. Longer term time and materials assignments require longer termination periods and thus may not be cost effective.