As a small Business Owner you will be hard pressed for time, budget and even technical expertise. Your IT team may be a small group of individuals focussing on operations and performing just lights-on support for your applications.
Changing business scenarios necessitate changes in your organization. Processes need to changed, systems need to be upgraded and new ones need to be developed.
How to go about choosing the right partner for your IT needs?
This is not a new question but is important now with the changing business contexts and technological advancements. There are multitude of options and there is so much confusion.
Businesses have become digital and online. The pandemic has accelerated the shift to Cloud. Every business is expected to have online presence and be able to work seamlessly.
You need a partner who can help you navigate the maze of new technology offerings.
Ability to save costs
It is now easy build software solutions. Unless your vendor partner is still following old methodologies, he should be able to help you keep your costs low - both for development as well as maintenance.
Owning software is easy and affordable now. Your partner should have innovative approaches to building software solutions.
Timely delivery
Software projects were difficult to plan and deliver. With time the predictability of a
software project has increased. The quality of software is also easy to control now. There are many tools that automate code generation and testing.
Reusing open-source or prebuilt components also saves time. In turn this increases the chances of on-time delivery. Look for reusability and automation in software development and testing of your vendor partner.
Willingness to engage
Some vendors may have the capabilities but want to see only their side of the story. If the vendor thinks you are too small to engage with or that your budget is inadequate, you should not engage any further.
You should try to find a partner that is right for your size. Flexibility and willingness to adjust are important in your partner.
Trust
A partner should be willing to do more. The partner company should be like an advisor to you rather than just being an order taker. During your interactions you should try to gauge if the vendor sees his success in you achieving your goals. Contracts and agreements are important. But implementations often face unforeseen challenges.
Your partner should be willing to go beyond and further to help you achieve your goals.
Here is a checklist that you can use:
Is there experience in the domain and technology you are interested in?
How many project delivered?
Is it a company in operation for significant number of years or is it a loose grouping of freelancers?
What innovative offering do they have?
Questions on Technology Solution
How simple is the implementation? Your team needs to understand and run it once it is handed over to you.
How easy is it to make changes to the application?
Taxes, death and changes are the only certainties in life. Any application will require changes over time. An evolving application that is easy to change should be your objective.
If changes are not easy to make then you will always be dependent on your Tech partner to help or will be required to build a team of expensive coders yourself.
With nocode technology it is not just easy to build an application but it is also easy to make changes to the application, without having to code most of the times.
Does the solution have a responsive web design?
How fast can the solution be developed?
Is it scalable? Should your business grow system should automatically be able to scale without expecting any intervention from you. Intervention means costs.
What is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)? Cost of building and running application year after year.
What is the running cost for the application? Should be designed well to consume resources (DB and I/o) optimally. Look for the kind of Tech Expertise and support required.
How SECURE is it? What are the network and application level security and encryption features?
How easy is to integrate with 3rd Party services and systems? You may need to connect to payment gateways, internal systems for data exchange etc
How Fluid is the design? Adding new features and functionality should be force you to revisit the existing design and components.
There are vendors that offer Agile methodology to develop your application with reusable prebuilt components and services. This gives you massive savings in cost of implementation.
The low-code application development platforms go further than Agile methodology. They help you digitize your processes within weeks. You are on the Cloud for business with all the security and encryption required to protect your data. The applications built using such platforms are nimble and easy to integrate with third party services. Changes or enhancements do not require coding.
Low-code vendors are able to provide the flexibility of making field level, page level or even section -level changes through configurations. A very evolved user management allows you to choose who can access what.
These platforms are designed for responsive web applications that will save you from building separate mobile ( iOS and Android) versions.
Owning software is easy. You just need to get started. Get a right technology partner.
Get in touch with us for a FREE consultation about your needs.
Get the software your business needs, custom-made and delivered on time within your budget!