Custom Software Devlopment Guide - Part 2

Part 1 here

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Do I need a custom development solution? (Continued)

AN OFF THE SHELF SOLUTION DOES NOT EXIST

Just like you, your business is unique and you do things in a certain way. Sometimes a solutions exists and sometimes it doesn't. This is where a custom piece of software can help. You can design it to function exactly the way you need it to and solve the unique problem you have. This is the most common reason people turn to a custom software development solution. Some times off the shelf software simply doesn exist or there is a real 'deal breaker' issue within the existing solutions. Perhaps your requirements are more complex than what the market offers or you really have a clear vision of how you want your business tools to be. What ever the reason, creating your own solution can solve many of the issues with trying to use a 'one size fits all'' type of package for a business that is unique.

YOU'RE DOING REPETITIVE TASKS MANUALLY

In every business there many tasks that need to be done on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. These include things like logging data, wages processing or just about any other data entry style work. There is always going to be a degree of manual entry but a customised solution can greatly improve the efficiency of doing these tasks.

This could start with how you capture the data, like with a rostering and scheduling system for wages. Once you have this data you can use it to do things like client invoicing, wages or reporting. A custom solution can make this process streamlined and take the work away from you.

This could also mean inputting data into two seperate systems once, twice or even more. Reducing the touch points of any data has the obvious benefit of a huge time saving but also reduces mistakes and subsequent time required to fix any mistakes, or worse yet relying on faulty data as the point of truth.

What is the next step?

Get old school and grab a pen and paper and start to write down a list of everything that is currently causing you a problem. Then dream about your ideal solution that a development project would provide. List out everything you think of in terms of features and functionality. From this list, create a few lists:

• Dream features - these are the features that aren't a make or break of the project but would be really great to have. These are far out features that might happen but its ok if they don't.
• Must haves - without these, your development project is not going to be worth it
• Nice to haves - if it fits within budget and time scope, sure these features would be awesome
• Low priority - these will server a purpose to some degree but if budget or time constraints come into play, we can do with out.