Our Methodology

Methodology No Classroom Training, but Rather Only On-the-Job Teaching

Although teaching a class of people is an acceptable standard, our preferred approach to teaching Quickbase is to do so while our clients are actively building their app(s). Teaching an overview of Quickbase during many hours of classroom time does not "stick" as well as teaching basics while users actually construct live and vibrant tools for their organization.

We have done well with this model over nearly two decades. Typically a client knows they "want to be in the driver's seat on their app", when they first contact us. From then on it is simple, cost effective, and rewarding. You might have just opened your new Quickbase account, or may need help with best practices to revise and enhance some apps you have been building for years. Share your visions with us, so we can assess how they can best be implemented; then we work with you to bring them to life.

Maybe you or your team needs to create a dozen new fields and build or modify a form. That is enough repetitive work that 1) we can show you how, and 2) you can then learn by replicating our lessons multiple times. Those repetitions will help you build confidence, and empower you to reach your goals! Rather than paying us to configure fields, move them around on forms, and hide/show them with Form Rules, you empower your future learning-by-doing! Plus you minimize back-and-forth user-testing and spec re-generation cycles with us. When new specs emerge we can teach you the paradigm elements, so you can choose best implementations in the future. Our goal is for clients to become Quickbase Wizards. The more you learn, the more you will like Quickbase, and the more your team will thrive with your Quickbase apps. This is all about growing your long-term success with Quickbase.

You already have a clearer understanding of your company's operational work than we ever will. Therefor your visions for Quickbase projects will

• be better than ours from the get go,

• have laser focus on future goals (which you may not have even shared with us yet), and

• make your stakeholders much more satisfied because of your increased wizardry, both in meetings and at the water cooler!
  

We are happy to build them in front of you on a shared screen, or to instruct you how to do so while we watch and reinforce best practices. During those screen-share sessions you can learn exactly how the newly built functionality works. That means you can customize the functionality after the session ends, and can copy it to other apps without our help. Your stakeholders' Quickbase satisfaction skyrockets due to your innate working knowledge.

You are the Key Quickbase Person in Your Company, Not Us

Our key mantra is to develop Quickbase wizardry inside your company. Then when your cohorts ask for new functionality, you will already know enough to

• ask them the KEY details of their planned functionality, and

• describe how their interfaces might best be constructed and used.

Without you building Quickbase apps inside your organization, your cohorts would need our third party help continuously. They would have to describe to us the details of how your company works, and give us their best guesses of what they actually want. Having you as the conduit / intermediary to receive those specifications allows you to control and execute on the spec list more tightly, and for us to give you higher-level development skills and guidance whenever you need. Plus you know the details of how your company works already; you won't need to spend time educating us.

What is Our Relationship with You

Also, the following is really, really important. It's not that we don't like IT people. We love them. We actually are IT people. But you do not have to be an IT person to go far with Quickbase in your organization. In the two decades we have been "teaching to fish" we have taught Office Administrators, Organizational / Process / Work Flow Managers, Quality Control Managers, Executives at the top, and Entrepreneurs just starting their companies. Each of the actual relationships that I just listed lasted for many years. Quickbase is easy to use; you do not need to be an IT geek to learn how to build excellent apps with it. All you need is to learn 1) what you need to do the work yourself, and 2) that we will back you up and make you a shining star for your stakeholders.

How Available are We

Although we prefer to schedule longer sessions in advance, you can always call us on a momentary whim if you suddenly need help. We will try to answer your call immediately, or return it quickly. We charge for the first full hour, and then for 15-minute increments thereafter. Therefore it is cost effective to keep a updated list of things you want to learn, so that when you suddenly need help right away, you can then add a few more things from your list to get the full value out of our first-hour of billing. Most importantly, you don't have to beat your head against the proverbial wall. Just call or email us.

Sample App Templates

Also, Quickbase is kind of unusual, in that there are no limits to what you can build with it. You can even download sample apps from the Quickbase App Exchange. We highly recommend doing that. You may decide that those downloads only serve as inspirational and educational starting points, and will not be modified to build your app from. We do that often as well. Downloading apps is easy, and deleting them is equally easy once you no longer need to learn from them. Once you get an idea of how your app can be built, and decide that you want to build it from scratch, then go right ahead. You already know a lot of the "how", and we are always here to answer questions and teach you more.