My friend, Norman got himself into trouble! He needed some extra help to design a software product for the market, and he needed it done right. His team interviewed and selected a company with application development experience and quickly discovered that they really couldn’t make the transition from application development to software product development.
OK, I’ll admit it. Last week, I nearly got kicked out of a nice restaurant in the city. Why? Because my friend, Lucy was telling me about her company’s business decision to build a software product, and she said this, “Our team can handle it. We do application development all the time.” That statement was all it took to drive me over the edge. Call me crazy, but I have lived through enough so-called software product development projects to know that, without the right team and skill set, the project is doomed to fail. No, I am NOT being overly dramatic!
If your enterprise wants to create a software product for the consumer or business market, your executive team may want to hand over the project to an internal IT team. If your in-house IT team is up to the challenge, that’s great. But, for most enterprises, the prospect of creating a software product for market is daunting and typically results in cost and time overruns and does not succeed.
Elegant MicroWeb created a solution for a performance management and benchmarking consulting business to provide a data-secured, web-based Performance Monitoring, Improvement and Analysis solution with performance optimization tools designed around the principles of knowledge and activity-based management.
You know what would be boring…?
A lesson on psychology! So as to make the article interesting, let us progress with a story arc format consisting of the good, the bad and the funny side!
The Good Side of the Story!
We have known people and have worked for people who understand nothing about technology, but have a defined domain knowledge or expertise or clarity of purpose to pursue use of technology to expand their skills to a global arena through automation made feasible by technology.
By automation, we are specifically talking about delivering value through use of software, rather than manual tasking.
Say for instance, an auditor who does auditing of major hospitals, food & beverage industries have found that the process could be optimized by use of an iPad type device that will carry the standardized forms for compliance regulation and works, just works! On both offline and online mode.
This simplification is a welcomed simplification; business needs efficiency, less paper work, more quality coverage and accuracy.
This forms the clarity of purpose behind the development of software product.
