Although we have done our share of small, very brief projects, we generally look for customers with whom we can build a long-term relationship. We have several customers who have seen most if not all their staff leave who we originally designed applications with in the 80’s, but they still count on us to be available whenever they need help modifying and maintaining those applications - in many cases they are still able to work with the original Trilogy person who helped design and build the original application many years ago.

Over time, our business-specific knowledge has accumulated to the point where we view that knowledge as an added value we bring to the table every time we start on a new design project, or step back in to help enhance an existing application. Our customers tend to have at least some in-house programming staff. They buy off the shelf wherever they can, and reserve custom development resources for those areas where their unique business needs call for cutting-edge solutions. Trilogy often partners with in-house staff to form a project team.

• In-depth business-specific knowledge of the problem to solve.
• An understanding of the business environment.
• Direct communications with (and the trust of) management.
• Skill in certain application development tools that the business may have standardized on. (For example, the customer might have a preferred User Interface tool that is outside Trilogy’s experience, and choose to have in-house staff build the UI portion.)
• As many programming hours as the staff can spare for the project.

• Long experience turning specific business problems into successful database application designs.
• Experience and expertise building n-tier client-server applications, including some specific "foundation" designs that we have implemented and tested extensively in production applications for other customers.
• Experience in UI design and development with VB 6.0, HAHTSITE, and other web app design tools.
• Training as desired for the in-house staff, so that when the project is complete, the staff can maintain most if not all the application themselves. (This assures management that they are not becoming overly dependent on outside consulting).
• As many programming resources as the customer needs from us to augment the hours that the in-house staff can spare for this project.

We have found that we have been most effective helping organizations where we deal directly day-to-day with a high-level technical "contact" in-house who is part of management or has management’s trust. The partnership develops most smoothly then because: Management’s trust in the contact assures management that Trilogy’s work has the business’s best interests as a priority. The contact’s technical background gives them an appreciation of the application development process, and of Trilogy’s value to the application development process. As projects reach completion, our contact can smoothly phase Trilogy out of an active role in the long-term maintenance of the project, working with us to transfer that role to in-house staff.

This way, Trilogy can continue to focus on design and development of new projects (which is what we do best and prefer to keep doing), and management is assured that they are in complete control of their mission-critical applications, and not dependent indefinitely on outside consultants.

Since at any given time, we are doing work for several different customers in different industries and with different design needs, we are constantly enhancing our basic design methods, and improving the "framework" tools we use. We find that the cumulative effect of this experience gained from real applications built in many different situations brings a depth of experience that is difficult for in-house staff to match, even with frequent trips to industry seminars. When we start a new project, we always bring with us new ideas and better methods learned on the last project for some other customer.

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