custom software development
On the surface, off-the-shelf applications seem the obvious choice to get your computer completing the tasks that you need done. But while a person on the street would be silly to pay to have their own spreadsheet application developed when Excel is right there in the Microsoft Office suite, the same may not apply to a business looking to automate a portion of their proprietary process.
Most organizations require very specific tasks to be completed by their computers. And while an off-the-shelf solution may be capable of completing these tasks, they will often do so inefficiently or not as effectively as they could.
More and more organizations are realizing this and see custom software development as a real investment in their business. After weighing the higher upfront costs against the greater efficiency and effectiveness that a custom solution can offer, it might be surprising just how quickly a custom developed application can pay for itself. It’s imperative to understand the benefits of custom software development, what the custom development process entails, and how businesses use custom software to get ahead.
Further, understanding the long-term cost and risks associated with a company not moving forward with a custom solution is essential. This is because custom software development can often alleviate several issues within a business all at once; not being able to find the right product off the shelf, increasing efficiency, easing growing pains, and improving customer experience as a result. Many business owners are leery of the process of development or of the assumed greater cost, without fully realizing just how many costly problems custom software could alleviate for their company for the long-term.
In this article we’ll share:
How to know if you need custom software development for your business (including the custom vs. off-the-shelf debate)
What custom software development can accomplish for your business
What the custom software development process entails
What to expect for custom software development cost and budgeting
How Do I Know If I Need Custom Software Development for My Business?
Tell-Tale Signs that Your Business Needs Custom Software Development
Often an organization outgrows their previous solution but has not sufficiently planned in advance to either modify their current solution or move to a new one (whether that be custom development or off-the-shelf software).
Especially in periods of growth, inefficiencies and problems reveal themselves in businesses, so here are a few signs that your business might be experiencing problems because of less-than-optimal solutions:
Recurring problems regularly require a lot of time or manual labor.
Processes need to be streamlined.
Systems are too spread out and can’t easily coordinate (i.e., coordinating supply chain, operations, administration, and customer satisfaction).
Noticed decline in efficiency and growth.
Unable to capitalize on an opportunity for a new revenue stream.
Current technology is outdated.
Managing your customer base is becoming more difficult.
A point of potential failure needs to be addressed and alleviated.
Your company is struggling to maintain its competitive advantage.
For more on this, read our complete guide to assessing if your business needs custom software.
If your business is showing any of these signs, you could be missing out on harnessing opportunities for growth, and your employees might be dealing with nagging inefficiencies that limit their effectiveness.
The Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Debate
One of the biggest hang-ups for business owners is deciding if an off-the-shelf solution would do the trick and be cheaper than investing time and money in custom software development. We love helping businesses weigh these pros and cons, and we always advise businesses on choosing a solution that will have the most long-term benefit, whether it ends up being custom or off-the-shelf.
In many cases we see that an off-the-shelf solution could solve one or two problems that the business has but may not be able to adapt to the plethora of unique needs that may come up in the future, leading to the need for custom development later on. Business owners often assume that off-the-shelf means that a software is perfectly ready to go and can just be installed painlessly, without any integration or troubleshooting needed, but that isn’t the case for most businesses.
Often with off-the-shelf solutions a business will find that it doesn’t have some of the features that they’d really want and that it doesn’t integrate as easily with other programs they are currently using. So employees continue using several programs even though a custom solution could help them get the job done all in one place- more efficiently and without having doubled up information or tasks. A custom solution can save time, can be designed to integrate seamlessly with your other solutions and your technology strategy, and allows for the customization of features for your unique business needs.
Even better, when you work with a custom provider, if you find out later that there’s another feature you need or that is extremely important, it can be added on rather than having to switch to a completely new software that has that feature. You save training time by being able to adapt your current solution rather than switching solutions altogether. If there’s a feature that could save you money and is worth the development, with custom software development, you can have it.
To keep the pros and cons of custom software development versus off-the-shelf software simple, here’s a list of our pros and cons from a previous blogpost on the topic.
Our goal is to empower businesses to use technology to get to their desired ‘future state’ as a business. We talk in detail with our clients about their long-term goals for their business, and we’re committed to enriching your business with the best solution for the long-haul. If you don’t need a custom software solution, we’ll be honest about it, and if you do, we’ll be sure to build it to suit your exact needs, including helping you identify what you might not need to waste time or resources on. We’re committed to our clients for the long-term, no matter the solution.
For an in-depth debate of custom vs. off-the-shelf solutions, download our guide here, or feel free to get in touch with any questions.
What Custom Software Development Can Do for Your Business
For a business, a custom solution could mean millions of dollars saved in labor, costly problems prevented or alleviated, or sales and customer satisfaction increasing because of a better customer experience. Here are just a few ways custom software can help your business:
Custom Software Can:
Ease organizational growing pains.
Improve internal organization and efficiency.
Improve access to information and streamlining information sharing.
Ensure consistency of information across the organization.
Streamline workflows.
Serve the unique needs of key clients, leading to increased retention and opportunities for demonstrating capability to prospective clients.
Harness opportunities to expand into new markets.
Increase data availability and improve ease of reporting.
For examples of how we have helped businesses do this and more (and to hear exactly what benefit those businesses experienced directly as a result of custom software development), check out this blogpost with our favorite custom development case studies. We have helped companies navigate huge acquisitions, keep pace with success, and cure systemic spending, all with custom software development.
What Does the Custom Software Development Process Entail?
If you choose to go down the custom software development path, understanding the ins and outs of the development process will help it go smoothly and ensure the final product is delivered exactly as you need it. We’ll always walk businesses through each stage of the development process, but previewing will help you ask necessary questions and think ahead to help us create the best custom software solution possible.
At CSG we apply agile principles to our consulting and software development engagements and strive to provide value quickly through an iterative approach. This approach delivers results at the conclusion of each iteration that enable review, adaptation, or re-prioritization of the future work.
How does it work? In short, work is organized into a prioritized backlog that the team works through in iterations (Sprints). Sprints have a short and consistent 2-week duration, clear goals that describe the purpose and value of the Sprint, and a clear definition of what constitutes completion of the work (e.g., data modeling, development, and/or data visualization) by the end of each Sprint. By doing this, CSG gets functionality into your hands as quickly as possible for review, adaption, or re-prioritization of the work in future Sprints.
This approach minimizes the overall risk associated with the engagement and enables the team to focus in on the functionality with the most value. We also understand that our customers may have different approaches to the incorporation of agile development principles. Therefore, it’s critical that we agree in advance on the approach to ensure success.
The advantages of an agile approach include:
Allowance for Change. Changes in scope happen for many reasons in any engagement, including the new insights gained into how the system should work, new ideas that occur based on interacting with functionality, and of course user feedback.
Iterative Development. The best way to handle the complexities of software development is to work in small steps toward a goal rather than try to identify and nail down all the details in an exhaustive (and time consuming) up front development of a specification that’s difficult to read and will not prevent change from occurring.
Frequent Feedback. Short cycles enable the opportunity for changes to be identified and addressed. Frequent interaction between our clients and our team reduces the opportunity for miscommunication and misinterpretation of requirements, and as noted above, allows for incorporation of new insights based on using the new system.
Focus on Business Value. Agile development strives to deliver business value through the functionality at the end of every Sprint or iteration. Our clients will be able to inspect progress throughout the engagement and functionality is put in the hands of end users quickly.
Transparency. By ensuring direct communication and frequent contact between our client and the team developing the system, we remove the black box from software development.
An agile approach offers the greatest flexibility and ability to cut away unnecessary development expense through testing and prioritizing features. Rather than trying to develop every feature a business can think of all at once, the most important features are developed first. If they find, earlier than expected, that the solution is sufficient for their needs, any extra features can be done away with to save cost, or those features can be revisited at another time in the future. If you have any questions about our agile approach and how it could work for your business, get in touch here.
What to Expect for Custom Software Development Cost and Budgeting
Every business owner is concerned about the cost of custom software development. How do you tell how much of an investment you’re getting into? Will your investment in custom software development pay off? Is there any way to eliminate costs and maximize your custom software development budget?
The answers to all of these cost questions depend on your business’ unique needs, but after weighing the higher upfront costs against the greater efficiency and effectiveness that a custom solution can offer, it might be surprising just how quickly a custom developed application can pay for itself.
The best custom software development firms will help you assess what the end value of a solution will be so that you can weigh cost versus benefit and decide if custom software development is worth it for their business. Whether the benefit is in monetary gain, efficiency gains, or merely eliminating a problem that can’t be easily quantified, you need to consider the benefits over time versus the level of investment.
As we mentioned previously, the agile approach improves the success rates of custom software development engagements. With more communication along the way, less costly corrections will be needed at the end and money isn’t wasted on developing unnecessary features.
Can you compare custom development quotes with in-house development costs?
Often businesses try to estimate the cost of custom software development by comparing a quote from a custom developer to how many hours it would take to have in-house developers do it, but we see this as comparing apples to oranges. In most cases, if your in-house developers were able to come up with a solution for the problem, they already would have.
Additionally, most in-house developers won’t have time to create an all-encompassing solution, as they surely have other priorities to take care of as well. And although experienced in development, they usually do not provide the same level of expertise when it comes to determining how a solution might impact your business processes and overall customer experience.
So although comparing hour-to-hour an in-house developer would seem like the cheaper solution, they might not come up with the same solution at all or have the time to develop it in their schedule. When you go with a custom software provider, you have their undivided attention and commitment to delivering the best long-term solution for your business. They understand the infinite impact that a well-executed and custom-fit solution could have on the success of your business in particular.
What do you do when the long-term value of your solution is difficult to quantify?
Lastly, in many cases, the value of a solution can’t be easily quantified. For example, if your company might be trying to eliminate a pain point that is creating inefficiencies, it might not be feasible for you to calculate exactly how much time each employee is wasting and how that would translate financially. In these cases we suggest that you come into any custom software development budget conversation having a good grasp on exactly how beneficial it would be to have the problem solved for your company.
If you can’t quantify it, you can prepare by asking employees questions about the problem to understand just how often they deal with the issue you’re trying to solve. Maybe it can be quantified by asking them how often a customer complains about a certain issue or by understanding how many more customers would have been retained if this problem had been solved already. As much as you can, get to know the depth of the problem for your organization through researching your data and discussing it with employees (even a quick questionnaire will do), and bring all of that information to your budget discussions to help your assessment.
We know that assessing the cost of custom development is very nuanced and unique to every business. For more information on how to maximize your custom software development budget (and timeline!), check out this blogpost.
Have Questions or Ready to Get Going?
CSG thrives on serving our clients by creating great technology solutions. We are passionate about our craft and believe it’s important to grow as people, consultants, teammates, and engineers. If you have more questions about custom software development or if you’re ready to start the development process, we would be glad to help. Click below to get in touch.