Isráfíl Consulting Services

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Thu Feb 11 11:08:00 EST 2010

by Christian Gruber

Rachel Davies, for whom I have incredible respect, posted this post called "Shu-Ha-Ri considered harmful". In it she points out that the basic notion of [full article]

I don't believe in "Business Value" (sort of)

Wed Aug 26 15:52:00 EDT 2009

by Christian Gruber

Ok, let's define terms. I'm not against value-oriented thinking. in fact, I'm all about the customer. I think whatever can add value to the customer or the output the customer wants (presumably software, in my case), the better. But this term "Business Value" has crept in to the Agile community, ...[full article]

Make Fake/Stub objects simpler with proxies.

Sat Jun 20 18:41:00 EDT 2009

by Christian Gruber

I recently wrote a convenience component. It's a Java dynamic proxy creator with a default handler that simply delegates any methods called on it to a provided delegate, throwing an UnsupportedOperationException if such a method isn't implemented. Why? Because I was sick of writing huge Fake impl...[full article]

A History Isráfíl Consulting Services

Isráfíl Consulting Services Corporation was founded in 1999 by Christian Edward Gruber and Jeanne Inamuco. With a background in computer science and political science, they set out to create a niche consultancy that blended technology expertise with an awareness of social systems and management theory. Christian's secondary background in comparative religious studies led them to name the company for the archangel Raphael, but in its Arabic form. In the Arabic cultural mythos, Raphael (or 'Esrafel, or Israfil) is a guiding angel who leads people to their goal, and who announces the coming of great occasions.

With clients mostly in the financial, high-tech, and resources sectors, Isráfíl Consulting primarily provided technical consulting, focusing on architectural oversight on projects, development mentorship, and software design and architecture. What became quickly apparent was the vast gap between the business and technology sides of our clients. Moving to fill that gap, Isráfíl found itself staffing a broad range of roles which consistently moved into that missing center role. Often our staff would be dealing directly with the business stakeholders and the project teams, bridging a gap usually only crossed by documents and sign-off processes.

With this business/technology background, and increasingly providing direct channels outside of normal Software Development Lifecyle (SDLC) processes, we discovered that we were moving in directions quite similar to those of the the Agile software development and Lean communities. To that end, and in collaboration with one of our partners, Berteig Consulting Inc., Isráfíl made the formal transition to using Agile and Lean methods in 2004, and began explicitly learning, consulting on, advocating, and teaching these approaches.

Today, Isráfíl Consulting stands by the principle that human enterprise is essentially a creative and dynamic endeavour. We seek to help organizations find ever more effective and efficient ways of delivering value to their customer, while nurturing the creativity, developing the capacities, and maintaining the enthusiasm of their teams.

phone:	+1 (905) 640-1119
e-mail:	info@israfil.net