At Typesafe, we have already partnered with quite a few consulting firms to provide professional services to companies looking to Go Reactive. In doing so, we ask each of our partner candidates to put together a Typesafe Activator template that showcases their skills, capabilities and quality of work. However, that doesn't give us much visibility into the specific strengths each firm brings to the table.
To help provide that visibility, we recently created a capabilities model for partners that reflects the many different aspects of our technologies. Consulting partners are asked to participate by having several members of their teams attend a virtual meeting with me, where I walk them through this process and identify how strong they are in each of the capabilities. If you go to the page hyperlinked above, you can explore the drop-down category menus on which we rank consultants, broken down by our core technologies and various aspects of how they can be used.
Beyond the model itself, I also make sure to probe consultants to get a feel for how deeply they understand the technology, and assign a ranking as a result. I came up with a 5-point ranking system to help identify levels of skill with each technology. You can think of this as an Erdös number for Scala–– which, of course, leads to questions as to whether Scala developers should have a Scala/Bacon number as well, but I digress.
On a scale of 1 to 5, here is how we assign ratings:
Of course, it's plausible that a person could be a Level 4, recognized as an expert in a technology because of their public speaking, while at the same time may not have put something into production. In cases like these, we rank the team/person as a 1.5, because without production experience we don’t believe it is possible to truly understand the dynamics of a technology.
The good thing now is that when a potential client asks us which firm is the best fit for them, we can review the results of our session and point them in the right direction. I thought this capabilities model is something we should share with the community, so that people outside of Typesafe can begin to think about where their strengths lie and where they may want to focus their efforts to grow their skills. The model itself is a living document and can change over time, and we will try to republish this periodically to reflect the updates.
If you have any questions or want to have a conversation about becoming a partner, feel free to email us at partners(@)typesafe.com or just scroll to the bottom of our partners page to complete a short form.
Alternatively, if you'd like to talk to someone about Typesafe subscriptions, training and consulting services, you can request to be contacted here:
