The goal of the consulting services is to identify the real needs of customers and to create the best solutions for those needs. With our expertise and help new services can be implemented more quickly, the systems can be used more efficiently and the multitude of systems present in today’s enterprise IT environment can be integrated much more easily. Our strength show most spectacularly in large, complex projects – for example, when building systems that spread to multiple sites or during integration and consolidation projects that involve the whole company.

Our company mainly provides technical consulting; nevertheless, our portfolio of services could not be complete without business consulting services, project management and various assessment and quality control activities. Consulting projects are fully supported by the other parts of the company: if needed, special applications are developed, or 24/7 support is provided to guarantee the success of a project.

Novell PSH is organized into and grows along solution groups. One project may involve several of them work together. In case of customers with a yearly contract, it is normally the Service Account Manager that organizes the work of the various solution groups. In case of large engagements, it is the Project Management group that takes the lead.

Platform
The Platform Solution Group is responsible for the large area that covers everything related to the NetWare operating systems and eDirectory and covers all the platform- and directory-independent products of Novell, such as the very successful NetMail messaging system, the truly shared iFolder and the Volera devices. This solution group is involved in practically every engagement and consists of our finest people.

Management
Most of the time the work of the Management Solution Group is anything but flashy: they are responsible for the Novell ZENworks product family, physical network analysis, discovery and all client-related problems. The result of their work is more spectacular: fully automated ZENworks implementations delivering applications to hundreds of clients.

Collaboration
GroupWise, is, of course, the flagship product the Collaboration Solution Group is responsible for. It is also their task to consult and support all other third-party messaging and collaboration systems running on NetWare.

Project Management
The Project Management Solution Group manages our large projects that require several or even all of our solution groups to work together. Using proven methodologies, the PM Solution Group has already tens of successful large projects behind and has a very high success rate.

metaDirectory Services
The metaDirectory Solution Group grew much larger and faster than we originally expected. The solution group built the Central Government Directory and led projects that resulted in 11 governmental organizations joining this central directory.

Application Development
The Development Solution Group, one of our newest SGs, is the one responsible for all our application developments and at the same time for the Novell exteNd product line.

Supplementary services
All the above solution groups rely on and are heavily backed up by other in-house services. The goal of these supplementary services is twofold: first, to ease the work of the solution groups and let them concentrate on their core expertise; and second, to ensure quality by well-defined processes:

Engagement management. We have by now learnt how important it is to coordinate our engagements very strictly - we have defined strict rules we operate by to separate responsibilities.

Solutions Sales support. A common performance-degrading factor is if solution experts are required to perform direct sales-related activities, for example write offers or price quotes. While our solution experts are of course required to provide technical help when, e.g. a system is quoted, they don’t have to deal with licenses, prices, and other sales-related activities.

Documentation and Q&A. Again, much of the document-preparation activities (e.g. translation, editing and proofreading) are off-loaded from our technical experts. It has also proved to be very convenient and useful to integrate these documentation facilities with a strict quality assurance process.

Consulting work is accepted by the customer signing the work sheets and/or Acceptance reports prepared by Novell PSH. Acceptance reports may be created monthly, quarterly or for each large project.
The basic unit of consulting is a consulting day. Consulting days are counted and accounted for as follows.

Time-based accounting
Site visits, on-site surveys, assessment and remote management are measured as time spent on the task. The smallest amount of time charged is 0.25 day. In case of overtime, nighttime and holiday work, this time is multiplied by 1.5-2.
Multiple consultants/engineers can only be charged if they actually worked in parallel.

Day-based accounting
Documentation preparation, training, lab tests and development is charged by the day, independently from the fact how many people were actually working on the task. The smallest amount of time charged is 0.5 day.

Tolerance-type accounting
Telephone and e-mail support is considered to be of tolerance-type work. Within one project, tolerance-type tasks are summed up and then exchanged into consulting days. Here again, the smallest amount of time charged is 0.5 day. The number of consulting days charged depends on the number of people actually working on the task.

Converting consulting days
Upon the customer’s request, consulting days can be converted into training and support days. One consulting day can be converted into one training or support day.
Also upon the customer’s request and notice in advance, the consulting days provided by Novell PSH may be used for other types of IT consulting, not necessarily strictly related to Novell products.