Posts by Juan Soto:
If your client sees you as a cost center you already lost…
Access can do great things, on a short time frame and with a smaller budget than other technologies. If your client can’t see the benefits of your work it’s your responsibility to step up and show them how your work output should be considered as part of a profit center. Here’s how:
– Perform a payback analysis
Nothing shows you’re value more then a ROI analysis of your work. If you did your due diligence during the discovery phase you should have a good grasp of the business problem you’re solving, now dig deeper and determine how much money you will save your client with a great Access solution.
– Can’t quantify savings? How about improved customer service? Productivity? Ability to expand?
Don’t short sell yourself if the ROI is difficult to come by, sometimes it’s hard to come up with an analysis that will show bottom line dollars, if that’s the case then aim for the intangibles: Does your app improve customer service? Can the firm do more with the same amount of people? Will the database prepare the company for growth going forward?
– Avoid the “L” word
It pains me to say it, but some executives I’ve worked with have mentioned “Layoffs” when seeing the improvements our firm can bring them. I prefer the “doing more with the same amount of people” analogy myself. You always want buy-in from the team helping you at your client, so avoid terms that will produce anxiety.
– Think of your work as a Profit Center
Many times it’s very easy to quantify savings…and so I always use the word “Investment” when referring to the cost of our work: “Your investment for this project will be…” is a line you will see at the end of my proposals.
Always view yourself in the right light and close more deals for your practice, get started today!
Subquery and the Scalar Query
Today’s guest post come’s from Mark Davis, a Access MVP. You can learn more about him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markgerarddavis The concept of a subquery itself is fairly straightforward: have a query within a query. However, there are various applications of the subquery. Most frequently, a subquery is used in a filtering context: SELECT a FROM n WHERE [...]
PAUG Live Blogging
This week I’m at Paug’s Access conference in gorgeous Silverfalls, Oregon. I’ll be live blogging here so come back here often for frequent updates over the weekend. It’s sold out – again Yet again this year’s conference was sold out, not because there’s a ton of people here but there is a low threshold of [...]
Using Recursion in your Access database
Today’s guest post come’s from Mark Davis, a Access MVP. You can learn more about him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markgerarddavis At its simplest definition, recursion is a function that is applied to itself, or a function that is called by itself. Here is a basic example, taken from mathematics, of a factorial. 5! is expressed as 5x4x3x2x1, [...]
Part 4: Switching from Production to Beta backends in SQL Server with ease.
Author note: This is the final post on a four post series on DSN-less tables in Access. You can review part one here. Take a look at part 2 here. See part 3 here. How can you test changes in the cloud with your Beta users? Once you’ve rolled out your Access masterpiece using SQL Server in [...]
Part 3: Destroy your linked tables on exit
Author note: This is part 3 of a series on DSN-less tables in Access. You can review part one here. Part 2 here. Part 4 here. In part three of this series I’m going to give you the code to delete all of your linked tables once the app closes. Deleting your links makes your app secure [...]
Part 2: Linking tables using a SQL Server table
Author note: This is part 2 of a series on DSN-less tables in Access. You can review part one here. Part three here. Part four here. In last week’s post I talked about using a single table in your SQL Server database to easily manage security, in today’s post I’m going to take it one step further and [...]
DSN-less tables; a better way…
Author note: This is part 1 of a series on DSN-less tables in Access. You can review part two here. Take a look at part three here and part four here. In my first post on this topic, I sent you to Doug Steele’s great article on how to do DSN-less table connections. Today I’m starting a new series [...]
Why using unbound forms are a bad idea
Many of you know that I’m a big fan of Access with SQL Server, and if you’re a frequent blog reader you will also know it’s not easy to optimize the relationship between them, it takes work but it’s very rewarding when they’re working great. Some developers however go to the extreme and use unbound [...]
One new post and interview on Office.com!
Office.com has again asked me to write a guest post for them, click below to see the post: Five Common Pitfalls When Upgrading Access to SQL Server They were also kind enough to interview me: Q&A with Access developer Juan Soto Join me at the PAUG conference! I’m really pumped about this years [...]
