Choosing a partner company or a vendor to support a digital transformation of your business is a really important component of your business.
As a business stakeholder, you need to make a decision that will be effective over a possibly longer period of time.
We believe there are several key factors every client must detect in order to make a proper decision.
Off-the-shelf solution or a custom development solution? Or a mix of both?
There are different solutions on the market that can support your business. For example, you want to implement a new sales CRM and you found an existing cloud solution. You need to ask yourself
- Can it cover your business workflow and operations?
- If not, what would be the cost of building your own solution? If the cost is too high, does it make sense to settle with certain compromises and use a product that already does a job?
- OR, is it possible to extend the off-the-shelf solution?
We want to use the approach that is the best cost-benefit for your business. Our goal is not to build everything from scratch if that makes no business-wise sense.
What are important things you need to keep in mind or ask while hiring a development agency?
Does the tech partner care about your business idea?
A development agency should not focus on developing software. It should focus on solving your business problem. For that reason it is vital a development company shows an interest in your work:
- What is your business idea?
- Who are your competitors and how do you want to stand out?
- What are the key problems you want to solve?
- Did you try to solve the problem?
- What would be your idea of success after the development work is done?
- Do you have experience managing similar projects?
Before any line of code is written, it is extremely important the development company can fully understand the need and the business flow.
Usually, we prefer working on customer discovery and refining the execution before any code is done. According to our experience, clients that prefer working in that way spend 57% less in the software development phase. This initial phase is important for setting the scope of work and how the project will be tracked and measured.
You want to build a digital product, but I do not have such experience. How can you help me? Can you explain your product development process?
As we said earlier, a proper developer agency will keep an eye on your feedback and validation what are the key elements and features that are success makers, while other ones can be placed in follow-up development stages.
As a development agency, we want to ensure you are spending your budget to generate revenue, not to build software. We believe that was your initial goal, to build software in order to general revenue or save costs, right?
By using different types of project management tools, we are helping clients manage activities and tasks along with costs and estimations of milestones and deadlines.
Can you help you manage your project?
We have experience providing our own project manager or a product manager. Our team has experience working with external management. For us, it is important we have a proper team and project management structure prepared.
Which services do you provide besides the coding?
A proper software agency should be able to secure UI/UX development, discovery phase, and product planning before those mighty coders start writing any code.
One of the first things we prefer doing is wireframing the product. That is a short intro stage where our UI / UX experts create a non-functional visual display of future software. Through that stage clients and we can display features needed to build a good product, see what are key functionalities, and discover what else is needed.
Also, through this phase, we can provide a much better budget estimation.
So, make sure the software agency can provide you with a full-service, not only code development.
How can I track the project process?
We provide our clients access to the task management tools, Slack, or even WhatsApp communication channels so you can be in a constant communication with our teams. We setup up weekly on biweekly meetings (we love talking to our clients, but we pay attention not to make too much administration work to ensure a proper overview of activities.
Did you work on similar projects?
It is vital to understand the software company has the understanding of project complexity, business domain, or has experience with projects with a similar challenge.
So, you guys will say “Yes” to everything in order to get a project?
During the initial phase, experienced software companies will provide you with ideas on how to refine your ideas. In translation, they will say “no” to some of your suggestions or feature requests for valid reasons.
Our expert engineers can build any feature you prefer. However, we do not like creating a code or a feature if it will only eat your budget.
How do you charge your services?
For smaller projects, we will work on a discovery phase with you and provide you with a quote about the fixed project price.
For more complex projects, we will provide you with a cost estimation of how many people would work on the project, the monthly cost per team member, and the duration of work. This way we can ensure an agile development process and your company will be paying on a monthly basis.
Contact us
If you want to hear more about what we can do for your business, send us a message at sales@viagemit.com.
