Whether your company has not yet built an IT department or you have an organization-wide team of hundreds of engineers, there are advantages to hiring software consultants to move your projects forward.
The specialized expertise you can find from using consultants can save your company time, money, and painful errors and rework. The right consultant can improve the quality of your software and bring you a significant return on your investment.
What Does a Software Consultant Do?
Software consultants are technology professionals with experience in stepping in to assist companies in advancing their software projects. Consulting companies offer a range of services to help their partners from technology strategy and management to development and software engineering to systems integration projects.
You may need a full solutions project utilizing your company’s specific needs, building the software, and then either supporting it for you or transitioning it to your in-house staff. Perhaps you need help in only one area of your software project like pre-build definition and mapping or post build testing.
Additionally, you may only need professional programming or engineering skills in one area to bring value to your clients. Consultants help you understand your needs and assist your team in reaching success in your software projects.
Why Do So Many Businesses Use Software Consulting Companies?
In the last few years, the role of technology has changed from something that helped businesses get work done to be at the heart of the company. Industries that used to do the majority of their business face to face like banks, retailers, and insurance companies now find that business services have shifted to be almost exclusively online.
During the pandemic, the move to digital technology accelerated with education and medicine making significant growths in online offerings. The pace of business and the speed of advancements in technology make it difficult for many businesses to own the work of managing the multi-faceted needs of their technology.
Software consulting companies can provide a personalized partnership with the innovation, expertise, staff, and support that can meet a company with the services they need today and help them move forward confidently for all their technological needs for the future.
Let’s take a closer look at some benefits to partnering with a company that offers software consulting services.
Benefits of Hiring a Software Consulting Company
Specialized Expertise
Software development consulting companies hire and train team members to be able to invent, design, build, and test software. This skill set is different from those development professionals who companies depend on to maintain and evolve existing software.
Consultants who build custom technology applications from scratch take your business ideas and bring them to life. To do this, they hire and train teams in the latest technologies across the rapidly changing software landscape. These teams generally consist of architects, analysts, engineers, developers, and product owners with a career focus on consulting across industries. These professionals also have experience working together to bring a variety of projects successfully to market.
Selecting an experienced team instead of hiring individual players to supplement your team can make all the difference. A quality consulting firm will also have teams with specialized expertise to match your specific needs like experience in mobile development, cloud consulting, web application, or success in your industry vertical or particular global market.
Agnostic View
Your current team may not be able to see the forest from the trees. Even very skilled engineering experts can be too closely involved with the development of existing software, leaving them with an inability to step back and view the software objectively. It is understandable, but it is also costly.
A software consultant has experience in analyzing existing products for clients–either fully built and aging or a new partially built project–and experience tactfully, but honestly, presenting their view. This agnostic view frees up the emotion from your needs and can launch you forward with a strong implementation for your solutions.
Using best practices to help your development management staff bring their knowledge of your technical system without bias toward a particular solution, the teams can work together on an implementation that will create the custom product your business needs.
Project Roadmap
Whether you need to get started on a new project or rescue an existing system, an experienced software consultant can examine your business need to define what the software should do, create a list of the technological needs, and craft a roadmap to move the project from current state to finish line.
Whether you need a simple web application, a cloud implementation, or a global enterprise build, there is a consulting company with the right industry experience–a team of engineers, developers, and management with the right skills and processes to help you map a plan for success.
Software consulting requires not only an understanding of the end goal but the ability to segment the work into milestones and provide data that will help track progress and forecast issues. The right software development consultant provides services that will move you from an idea to a launch smoothly.
Increased Quality
Software consulting companies take pride in the quality they deliver. However, they also understand the importance of including you and your company in your technology build. Consulting is not replacing your expertise but collaborating with you.
A high-quality consulting partner will be upfront with the time expectations for you and your management team. From the start, they will be certain to relay that your team will need to be involved regularly to describe the business needs, provide the voice of the customer, review UX design documents, approve requirements, and test the software.
Together, you will work to bring each idea, service, or process into your digital solution. Your consultants bring expertise in creating a quality product as well as experience in getting the best quality out of your team and into the hands of your customers or employees.
Decreased Costs
The easiest costs to see decreased will be realized by your HR team. Using software consulting services instead of adding to your full time staff means not spending money on recruiting, training, turnover, benefits and vacations. You can experience a higher level of expertise than you could afford to hire in house.
Utilizing a consulting company will allow you to access cloud engineers, web UX design specialists, mobile developers, data architects and other roles for only the few weeks or months you need. Additionally, you can work with experts in strategy for your industry and benefit from their years of experience in the global market to advance your custom digital solution.
The overall efficiency of software development completed by a consulting company will keep your project on time, scope, and budget-saving you from overrun costs. Experienced development partners will also steer your company to cost-saving alternatives for technologies, tools, and platforms further saving you money.
InReduced Risks
Consultants are risk averse as part of the nature of their work. Software has bugs and in-house teams are used to causing and fixing them as a regular part of their jobs. They become numb to the pain of software defects as it is a day to day reality and part of job security. Consultants stay focused on predicting and eliminating defects before they can derail a project and the timelines they have promised to your company.
They understand the need to reduce development costs from fixes and rework to save precious time and keep their highly prized reputations for delivering services for their clients and the customers. Using data driven best practices honed from years of experience, consultants connect a business idea to a UX design to a data process in a technical implementation plan quickly and efficiently to bring the solution back to business to review before there is time for the project to get off track.
Control Scope
Software developers can be the biggest cause of scope creep. This can be due to the developer adding in new tech features that they find cool even if they were not specifically requested by the business or needed by the end customer.
It can also be caused by a lack of understanding of the architecture of a system or depth of knowledge of data structures, causing a developer to write more code than is needed which negatively impacts performance across the system.
Consultants solve scope creep in two ways: 1. They are hyper-focused on delivering the exact services you need and will assist your business team in creating clear and focused requirements and 2. They always return to the technical enterprise architecture to ensure the code they present is clean.
Consulting engineers understand the need to build sustainable, high-performing products that meet or exceed business expectations requiring appropriate tech support.
Improve Velocity
Companies with expertise in providing consulting services understand the importance of meeting deadlines for clients. They are used to making commitments and working to reach each milestone on the solutions roadmap.
Software consulting companies generally have a suite of tools they have developed in house to keep their clients informed, their builds on time, and their speed on pace. They have management practices and specific services to reduce waste and build agilely.
Professional consultants also create training specific to your solution, design documents related to your operations, and design artifacts for integration across your enterprise. While each in-house software developer needs to focus on maintaining your existing products, software consulting teams can focus on building your new custom features and technology products exclusively.
Long Term Partnership
Software consulting companies prize long term partnerships with clients. Unlike employees that may leave and move on to another company, a consulting firm can maintain the specialized knowledge of your particular company’s software needs and the broad view of trends across your industry.
Having a company who understands your operations and systems with integration experience in your products, can help you design strategy for your solutions, and specializes in the tech that supports your market will bring your business value beyond the products they build.
Technology experts available to step in when you need them with minimal ramp up time provide maximum benefit. Geneca’s current longest running client partnership is 23 years with hundreds of different projects bringing a variety of web and mobile ideas to life across that long global partnership.
Whether you need on-going support or to re-engage when you have a new project or a feature set to be added to an existing product, a long-term consulting partner can be a game changer for your firm.
Enhance Your Value
Unlike off the shelf software which adds to your costs, creating your own custom software is an investment in your future. It becomes an asset, one of your most important assets, increasing the value of your company.
Software that is specifically tailored to your clients, providing improvements in your services and operations, will help you create better solutions for your customers. Your management will have a leg up on other leaders in your industry.
While you might not be an expert in tech, you can use consulting services to add to your value while competitors are using the same ill-fitting software as one another. Your investment in your company’s future will pay dividends quickly.
Final Thoughts
Technology is at the heart of virtually every business idea, making software development an important investment for business owners. If you do not yet need a full-time in-house technical team, software consulting companies can be an excellent option for your development needs.
If you do have an in-house development team, but need to add specialized expertise or increase the quality and velocity of your projects, an experienced consulting partner can be a solution for you.
Either way, there are benefits to having a conversation with an experienced consulting leader to discuss your current needs. Contact us here for a free consultation with Geneca to explore your options.