A part of our clients is not versed in software development. They are using software products for various reasons – to improve communications inside the company, as working tools from data collected from their customers, as marketing tools, etc…
It is hard to see investments in updating/upgrading the software as an important business decision ! The management should see it as an important decision based on metrics measured inside the company:
- customer satisfaction
- workforce better utilization
- smarter use of the internal resources
- keeping up with the competition
The role of a consulting company is not only to deliver a product but to infer, from the requirements, what is the real need of the final product. There are basic questions we want to answer in order to propose an integral solution and (it happened several times) the final product is comprised by a richer feature set than initially envisioned by the management. In the same time, as a software product is ageing there are alternatives or tools which can be used as supplements to enhance the value or get more benefits.
All those ideas are brought by a software consulting company which is in sync with the new technologies and can propose solutions to an old/existent software product. As a company using the software and deriving value from employing it you should focus on your business and hire for non-core functions (as software development). The software consultants should be preoccupied with the new advents in technologies, new solutions and development frameworks and how to apply them to your business requirements.
From our point of view, there are at least three stages when being “in-the-flow” with the business brings value as a software consulting company:
- providing more options and value than the initial planned solution
- enhancing the value of an existent/deployed software by stitching other services or “upgrades” during its lifetime in order to keep it in use
- proposing updates or complete rewrites due to fundamental upgrades of the underlying technology or due to market transformations of the discussed business