Question

I have a client whose requirement is best met with an XQuery/XML solution. The problem I am facing is overcoming the risk associated with a lack of market place skills for these technologies.

This is maybe a sales question, but how have others overcome this objection?

Answer 1

I’ll let someone else answer from a sales perspective or suggest technologies. Here’s my project management perspective. I think you should do two things:

1.) Cost of ownership assessment

Draw out two or three architectures and try to amortize in hours, $$$, or some other quasi-imaginary metric the immediate and ongoing impact to the client. For each solution, how hard will it be to build? How many different engineers will you need? How many different skilled people will you need to keep familiar with the project to maintain it, etc. Does the benefit of not having to have separate middle tier and dedicated relational database people outweigh the market availability of XQuery people? You have identified that the problem is best met by XQuery/XML. Can you quantify this somehow to your client?

2.) Risk mitigation brainstorming

The idea here is to come up with a plan to reduce the possible impact to the client for the technology that you choose:

• Start with a Proof of Technology project to gauge the difficulty and efficiency benefits for your staff / client to implement an XQuery solution
• Develop an in-house expert / team:
  • XQuery Training is available
  • Share cost of supporting XQuery expertise with other projects and similar problem spaces at your organization / client
• Expose the XQuery/XML portion of the solution through other means that don’t require special skills
  • XML and/or JSON over REST
  • Some sort of data access object layer that doesn’t remove the agile benefits of the XQuery technology
  • SOAP services (yuck)
• Build a relationship with a service provider who knows their XQuery well