New Information Paradigms Approach
We believe that our working approach and how we develop customer relationships are at least as important as our solutions themselves. The consistent and complementary themes that permeate and drive all aspects of how we work are:
- Many traditional methods have either been shown not to work optimally, or are not readily-adaptable to the new business climate
- Developing rich relationships with people: both between prospects and vendors, and between project teams and end-users
- Balancing innovation/standardisation and quality/structure with flexibility/pragmatism - anything that reinforces one at the expense of the other is not in our customers' interests, or ours
- Making sure that what we do fits well with customers' needs
We are a people-focussed company, operating as a dynamic, balanced and flexible team. We have a stimulating and fruitful working environment where opinions are freely expressed and challenged; the working atmosphere is informal, but focussed.
Our broad technical abilities are complemented by staff with a non-technical bias - for strategic, marketing and project management purposes - and our developers are also encouraged to become involved in "business" areas, to more closely integrate what they do with market requirements.
The development and business methodologies we use come from a wide variety of sources and experiences and we have invested significant time assessing and exploring new ways of approaching the business challenges of communication and relationship:
- Development
- Project Management
- Technology - the different technologies NIP uses in building its solutions
- Decision Facilitation - ideas developed and expressed by Sharon Drew Morgen for quickly identifying the key parameters in a buying-"selling" relationship and whether it will be successful
- The Value Net/Transaction Cost analysis - tools for defining business structures and then analysing any inefficiencies within them
- The Chasm model - a well-known body of material produced by Geoff Moore and the Chasm Group, which is extremely powerful in describing what affects the adoption of a new solution by its intended user-base
- Clean Language - a form of guided, but "non-directive" questioning, that assists in the process of creating shared understanding