Your expert Redmine consultant for advice, training, and custom development

Find the help you need to make Redmine work for you

Does Redmine do 95% of what you need but don't know how to get that last 5%?

Do you use Redmine but need some expert advice?

Or do you flat out know that you need custom development and plugins to make Redmine right work for you?

I can help.

I'm Eric Davis and I've been working with Redmine since 2007. In that time I've:

Basically, if you're running Redmine then you're probably using code that I wrote, debugged, or designed.

What can I do for you?

There are three primary areas where I help clients.

  1. Custom development. Do you have a new feature you need, a bug that's bugging you, or need to tweak an existing feature? I've over 9 years experience with Ruby on Rails and 7 with Redmine, much of it working full-time on the codebase.

  2. Advice and best practices. I've worked on Redmine installations ranging from solo-consultants to large governments to startups. Every one of them needed Redmine to work differently to fit their organization. Sometimes that included process design and workflow management. Other times custom code was needed to "glue" parts together. But knowing which part could be configured and which parts were missing where vital.

  3. Training. Sometimes the best value isn't in solving the problem but teaching others how to solve the problem. Like the infamous story about teaching a person to fish. If you have a team of developers or potential developers, a training course on Redmine development will help grow them so they can go fishing themselves. Or, em, I mean so they can do Redmine development themselves.

But don't worry, you don't have to choose only one option.

When you work with me, we'll review what you need help with and design a custom plan for you. Perhaps that's 100% custom development to build a collection of plugins. Perhaps it's training your IT staff on how to write code for Redmine and keep it running. Or maybe it's two days of training, two days of development, and a day of question-and-answers with your project managers.

I'm flexible and want to make sure you get what's best for you.

peter-chester After many years of working together, I can say with authority, that it's a privilege and a delight to work with Eric Davis. For many years he has been the sole developer behind our most critical business software which manages our teams, projects and finances. Recently he helped us transition to our in-house team by spending a week training us. I along with my dev team had a wonderful time collaborating with him and now find the process of updating and deploying our own code to be easy and inspiring.

Eric is extremely well organized, unusually adept at setting expectations, and has an uncanny ability to identify and adopt cutting edge technologies just as they become stable but before they become popular. He is a rare gem. I can't recommend him enough.

Peter Chester Partner, CTO at Modern Tribe, Inc.

How much does this cost?

I've made it as easy as possible to work with me. You can schedule to work with me for a week at a time. During that week, you'll get exclusive access to me. I'll write code only for you. I'll create training materials for just your team. I'll meet with your mangers for planning.

Each week requires an investment of $10,000. Compared to the cost of hiring a full-time employee with my experience, you should be able to see how that's a savings. (And trying to compare that to the cost of having your existing employees learn Redmine and Rails from scratch... it took me years of full-time Redmine development to know what I know.)

How does this work?

  1. Fill out the form at the bottom of this page to contact me. Make sure to include details of your project and any deadlines.

  2. I'll get in touch with you about your project. We'll probably start a few short discussions over email and phone.

  3. When we're ready, I'll send you a contract and invoice to get started.

  4. Then I'll schedule your week(s) and we'll get started.

What if I have a bigger project?

Bigger projects are welcome. There's a few techniques we can use when they are too big to fit into a week.

  1. Use multiple, consecutive weeks and continue development. Depending on the schedule and how much work is needed, projects 52 weeks or longer could be scheduled though 6 weeks is a sweet spot for getting started.

  2. Split the project into stages with one stage designed, developed, and launched before the next. This is the classical agile approach where we'd work together to scope, build, and release each stage at a time (a release could be an internal release, don't worry about giving your users an early or incomplete version). Each stage can run consecutively back-to-back or a rest week(s) can be built in. During this rest week you can get feedback, plan, and do anything else you need to do before we start up again.

  3. Spike and maintain is a mix of the first two options. A rapid spike of development is done at first to sprint to the first version, typically over 2-4 weeks. Then we'll scale back and slow down to one week per month to maintain, train, and make minor improvements.

What if you need just a little more?

If you need a little more than what can fit into a week, you could get a second week depending on scheduling. If even a second week is too much time, I might be able to accommodate a partial-week on a case-by-case basis.

How much time do I get?

This is a valid question, especially if you've only worked with hourly employees or freelancers in the past.

The thing is, do you really care about the time? If something would take you 40 hours figure out and do yourself but I can do it in 4 hours, you've just saved yourself 40 hours. And I'd still have time to do more things for you.

Practically speaking the amount of time depends on how much energy a project takes. Energy is affected by a lot of factors, for example:

You can't really measure these factors upfront. A hard project might be fun and innovative and actually be energizing.

What about maintenance?

There are a few options for maintenance depending on what you need. If you need a training refresher, we can schedule a new week of training several months out. If you want bug fixes and minor updates, we can work out a custom plan based on how much help you need. Same for security updates.

So far all my clients love Redmine Timesheet Plugin as a billing tool as well. With your plugin, it is extremely hard for a developer to pad hours without getting caught by the client.

Actually your plugin is exactly what we have been wanting for over 5 years.

DeWayne Whitaker CTO, Jazz.com

95% success over since 2007

As I have hopefully showed by now, I know what I'm doing. I have the experience to backup my development.

Enough experience that my project success rate is over 95%.

Yes, in an industry that quotes only 20% of projects succeed I'm pulling in successes 95% of the time.

(I didn't believe it myself at first)

That means the vast majority of my client projects have successfully fulfilled their goals on time and within budget. Of the failures, one delivered a working prototype under budget and on time but the client wasn't interested in continuing the project for internal company political reasons and another failed due to high staff turnover which lead to a knowledge drain and implosion.

Not the typical "consultant failed to deliver" failures.

burt-culver I hired Eric to write a plug-in for the open source ticket tracking platform, Redmine. He was a great help from the start by helping us define what we needed and how we wanted the plugin to behave. He delivered the project right on time and at a great price. It worked like it should and continues to be an often downloaded plug-in for Redmine users (leaving the plug in open source was our choice). I highly recommend Eric for any Redmine development (or any Ruby work for that matter).

Burt Culver, CTO, Fishpond Ltd

No risk

To remove even more risk for you though

Let's start a discussion...

Reserve your confidential consultation

If you're ready to talk about how I can help your Redmine, you can apply below:

Apply Now

There's no obligation or commitment by getting in touch. All that I ask is that you are as honest and open with me as possible so we can discuss and decide together what's the best option for you.

I'll be honest, I turn down more clients than I accept. I say this not to brag. It's more important to save my time and energy to work with the clients I can help the most and to let incompatible clients find someone else who fits them.

Eric Davis

Eric Davis

P.S. I can do anything with Redmine, within it's limitations. Not convinced? Here's a list of the plugins I've developed for Redmine.

  1. budget_plugin

  2. bulk_time_entry_plugin

  3. chiliproject_auto_close

  4. chiliproject_auto_wiki

  5. chiliproject_clocking

  6. chiliproject_custom_css_js

  7. chiliproject_invoice

  8. chiliproject_issue_aging

  9. chiliproject_knowledgebase

  10. chiliproject_message_bar

  11. chiliproject_require_time_entry_issue

  12. chiliproject_status_change_email

  13. chiliproject_time_entry_hours_limit

  14. customer_plugin

  15. google_analytics_plugin

  16. invoice_plugin

  17. question_plugin

  18. redmine_add_user

  19. redmine_ads

  20. redmine_application_title

  21. redmine_backdate_blocker

  22. redmine_billing

  23. redmine_changelogs

  24. redmine_client

  25. redmine_context_menu_relations

  26. redmine_contracts

  27. redmine_contributor_licensing

  28. redmine_custom_email

  29. redmine_data_generator

  30. redmine_download_counter

  31. redmine_email_only_owner

  32. redmine_email_watchers

  33. redmine_event_notification_override

  34. redmine_exception_handler_plugin

  35. redmine_external_signup

  36. redmine_extra_ldap

  37. redmine_extra_recipients

  38. redmine_heroku

  39. redmine_homepage

  40. redmine_issue_due_date

  41. redmine_issue_status_colors

  42. redmine_join_project

  43. redmine_kanban

  44. redmine_language_change

  45. redmine_ldap_user_family

  46. redmine_little_stream_software_design

  47. redmine_lock_users

  48. redmine_maintenance_mode

  49. redmine_merge_redmine

  50. redmine_overhead

  51. redmine_plugin_support

  52. redmine_plugin_tasks

  53. redmine_project_support_hours

  54. redmine_rate

  55. redmine_recent_issues

  56. redmine_remove_membership

  57. redmine_remove_menus

  58. redmine_reports

  59. redmine_require_issue_assigned_to

  60. redmine_require_issue_deliverable

  61. redmine_require_issue_due_date

  62. redmine_require_issue_due_date_in_future

  63. redmine_require_time_entry_comments

  64. redmine_restricted_status

  65. redmine_s3

  66. redmine_saas

  67. redmine_score_plugin

  68. redmine_simple_kanban

  69. redmine_simple_support

  70. redmine_sso_client

  71. redmine_sso_server

  72. redmine_static_link

  73. redmine_status

  74. redmine_tags

  75. redmine_url_custom_field

  76. redmine_user_homepage

  77. redmine_version_priorities

  78. redmine_wiki_comment_macro

  79. redmine_wiki_formatted_custom_field

  80. redmine_wiki_issue_details

  81. stuff_to_do_plugin

  82. system_notification_plugin

  83. timesheet_plugin

P.P.S. Thought I wouldn't list them all huh? And those don't even include private plugins or the hundreds of features I built into the core for the open source and client versions.

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