The most common reason anyone rings us. What to do with the notice period you have left, and how to stop one retirement becoming a crisis.
Request a free application review +44 (0)1293 562730One person has held the application together for fifteen or twenty years. They are retiring, or they have handed in their notice, and the realisation has just landed that nobody else can open the project, let alone change it.
It is not a failure of management. PowerBuilder applications tend to be reliable, which is exactly why they end up with one custodian and no succession plan — nothing goes wrong often enough to force the issue. The risk stays invisible right up until it is the only thing on the risk register.
The good news is that it is recoverable, and it is recoverable more cheaply than the rewrite that usually gets proposed at this moment.
Ring us before they leave rather than after. Weeks of overlap with the person who knows the application is worth months of reverse engineering without them, and it costs a fraction as much.
We can run this as a structured handover alongside your outgoing developer, which gets you a documented result rather than a folder of notes.
Full support and development responsibility passes to us. You get a team rather than an individual, and the succession problem stops being yours.
Your developers learn PowerBuilder on your own application with one of our consultants beside them. Sitting alongside a PowerBuilder consultant on a real project transfers skills faster than any course would, and there are no formal PowerBuilder courses to send them on in any case.
Reverse engineering and documentation of what the code actually does, so you can staff it, replace it or plan around it with your eyes open.
Western University in London, Ontario commissioned us to extract the business knowledge from their PowerBuilder application and document the key business functions from the code itself. A simple-sounding brief that is genuinely complex work — and it was delivered within the quoted budget and on time.
On the migration we ran for a bank in Kansas, training the bank's own staff was part of the engagement, so the knowledge stayed with them rather than with us. That is how we prefer to work.
Start before they go. The most valuable thing you can do in the notice period is capture what is in their head: build and release procedures, the parts of the application nobody else touches, the workarounds, and the things that must never be changed. We can run that capture alongside them if you would rather it were structured.
Yes, that is a large part of what we do. Many organisations come to us after losing internal PowerBuilder expertise. We take the application on, work out what it does, document what matters and provide continuity.
Yes. Western University in Ontario commissioned us to extract the business knowledge from their PowerBuilder application and document the key business functions from the code. It is detailed work but it is entirely doable, and it is usually far cheaper than the rebuild that gets proposed instead.
Only if you want to be. We develop your team's skills while we deliver, and if your intention is to bring the work back in-house we will build towards that. We have been trading since 1986 by being the supplier people come back to, not the one they cannot leave.
Tell us the PowerBuilder version you are on, the database behind it and what is worrying you. We will give you an honest read on your options, including whether the answer is to do nothing for now. The initial review of your application is free, and we are close enough to come and see you.
Telephone: +44 (0)1293 562730
