Bentley Motors

Bentley Motors

What was the issue?

Bentley Motors manufactures luxury sports touring cars. They are investing £500 million and now have one of the most advanced production lines in the world, fulfilling orders for the super-successful Continental GT.Bentley Continental.

Bentley employs over 1000 people at their world-wide headquarters in Crewe, UK. Located here are the development teams – IT professionals who are very proud to be helping to produce such beautiful vehicles.

Following careful analysis, the team decided to move to .NET as their development platform. The project manager took the decision to proceed with expert support, rather than just ‘rushing-in’ and potentially compromising important foundations to the architecture and platform. Several Web projects were due to be written in ASP.NET, including writing new corporate procedures based on industry best practice and another project which involved upgrading from an Access database to SQL server and .NET architecture.

What benefits were delivered?

Storm Software’s consultant Russell Lewis was involved with several stages of this project, which was very well defined by the team at Bentley, and started with a one day workshop introducing ASP.NET and bringing everyone up-to speed on the platform and development tools. According to Russ “One very appealing factor of working with the team at Bentley was that they included developers from a variety of programming backgrounds as well as network and deployment experts.”

How were they delivered?

Following formal training provided through Learning Tree International, and allowing the developers some time to get started on their projects, Russ was invited to follow-up with some mentoring sessions. This took the format of one-on-ones and also group presentations to consolidate the learning.

The mentoring sessions allowed us to link topics that were covered during training with the practical side of real-world development and proved hugely valuable. Knowing that they were going to be able to ask questions, each developer had prepared a list of questions. This helped them greatly as they knew it was OK to flag something which was causing problems as TODO, and just carry-on working, knowing they would return to that item with the consultant. In reviewing their code, the consultant was able to solve several problems and offer suggestions to improve design and re-usability.

Finally, many of the key points learned during each session were presented back to the development team so they could all benefit. Other aspects of the project and project management were also discussed and the team congratulated on its excellent progress with this new technology.

What were the results?

Storm Software received this very positive feedback from Bentley: “The calm, coherent and constructive approach you had to those busy, detailed sessions, made the process extremely productive and everyone was able to benefit from your very significant expertise as well as each of our own experiences. Everyone agreed that it had all been invaluable.”

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