I work for a mid sized Architecture and Engineering firm, our sub group focusses on developing tech solutions for engineers, mappers and technical managers. So we're heavy on desktop based apps for GIS and Civil/Env Engineering (some web). The company sells the services that our Engineers and mappers produce and our team develops tools that aids in them being more productive, efficient and help in adding value to their decesions and products, we DONOT sell the technology.
We are going through growing pains where initally we used to be extremely responsive and could rapidly prototype apps for engineers which immediately brought budgetary savings. That mindset has worked for us in the past. But this year we won a huge contract and our client base has basically quintupled (5 times?). What we are finding is that this rapid prototyping culture is hurting us, where project managers have started to expect short response times for tool development and robust production ready tools for all our engineers and gis analysts. We've grown organically and now it seems that we are running into these issues were it appears we have to scale back our speed for more stability.
Is this a legitimate tradeoff? Is there a win-win? How does one push back the engineer, project manager and analyst when they are our clients, they fund us and yet we need to be able to push back and tell them that if they want stability they have to be realistic about time frames?
This isnt Microsoft Word, these are specialized GIS software and Engineering models with a ton of interop components for other industry standard models, they arent idiot proof tools, they need informed inputs and we can only test things so much.
Has anyone dealt with similar growing pains? Recommendations/advice on a communication stance, books, blogs?
Appreciate the time!