How To Select The Best Software Development Consulting Company

Any software business looking for growth, especially if they’re already mid-sized or large, is going to come to a point where ballooning staff costs and the need for a fresh perspective becomes important. This goes double for operations that experience a dip in user satisfaction or sales. This is when getting a software development consultant on board may be a good idea.

Software Development Consulting and Your Business

Consulting is widely understood to mean bringing a third party in to help you handle your business, with a range of different sets of duties and levels of involvement. In the world of software, especially in SaaS, consulting is mostly limited to offering business advice and testing out changes. There are exceptions, much like consulting in any field; consultants may do things like optimize your software for performance and portability or help you implement new features.

At the most basic level, a software developer consultant’s job is to advise a business on how best to strategically position their product. From there, they collect tangible metrics after implementation to make sure that their advice created a positive and measurable change in the business. This can take place at almost any stage of product development and rollout, with one of the most common use cases being bringing a consultant or consulting firm on board to help improve an existing product.

Businesses can benefit from a fresh, outside perspective by bringing in a consultant. When it comes to software development, consulting firms and individual consultants often bring a long history of field experience, getting to see first or second-hand what works and doesn’t work. Consulting partners can take care of market research, implementation studies, risk management, and more, freeing you up to focus on development. In some cases, a software development consulting company offers full-stack development services, allowing you to bring them an idea and set of goals, and end up with a competitive, well-positioned product.

Sometimes, a company will already have a strategy in place and a means to test it, eliminating the need for a consultant altogether. In other cases, a company may bring a software development consultant right into their fold, putting them on the payroll for the long haul. It’s ultimately up to you to decide if bringing in a third party is the best move for your company and project, but if you do take that course, choosing the right partner can make or break a project, and ultimately, your business.

How To Tell If A Software Developer Consultant Is Right For You

The software world is a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of arena these days, making agility and proper positioning a non-negotiable element of business success. This goes double for more specialized or faster-growing areas, such as SaaS. Bringing in a software development consultant company can make a world of difference for your business, but that doesn’t always mean it’s the right move. Even if it is, care must be taken to choose the right partner.

In a typical software development outfit, you’ll have a number of different departments and roles that must work in concert to produce the best possible product and get it in front of the right audience. Software developers, quality testers, executives, marketers, and any other stakeholders must all be on the same page; there has to be a common goal in mind and an agreed-upon way to get there. In a word, synergy is the most key element in any successful software enterprise. Knowing your audience and having a vision for where your product will fit into their lives is necessary, but is only half the battle.

A typical software development cycle begins with an idea, usually from an executive, or an entrepreneur who ends up becoming one. From there, developers have to ensure that the vision in that idea is feasible, and figure out how to actually create that product and integrate relevant systems and solutions. Once the product has been created, of course, it’s up to marketers to ensure it gets in front of enough customers to make an impact on the market. Ongoing market research will be a necessity, along with quality assurance and customer support. Whether all of this is being done by a single person or the venture has a well-rounded team behind it, a software development consulting company can fit into the puzzle and provide insight to help shift goals and methods for maximum efficiency and reach.

A consultant’s role can vary greatly depending on when they’re brought into the picture. In the early stages, they can handle market research to see if a new idea is a viable business pursuit and what its reach may be. Further on in the process, they can conduct quality and optimization checks on the software itself, check into the user experience, get word back to you on what the best next move would be, and scout potential partners for third-party plugins, management systems, and other levels of involvement. A good anecdotal example may be a company with a cloud gaming service looking to streamline its workflow and client relations; a consultant would recommend ZenDesk, Salesforce, and other solutions, and provide a cost-benefit analysis on each, along with suggestions on how best to move forward with the ideas.

If your business is already established in your space, a software development consultant company’s role would essentially be to look at competitors in the space, listen to existing customers, spot marketing trends, and advise you on how to get more from what you’ve already built. Ideas on what to build next and how to implement it, with detailed analyses regarding market interest, downtime, and projected growth may also be available.

The same principles apply to full-service software development consulting. A consultant brought on at the earliest stages may test the viability of a business idea, suggest the most efficient ways to bring it to life, and even build it for you with direct supervision.

In the later stages, that same full-service crew may perform optimization tasks, help with server or backend maintenance, suggest changes and new ideas that have good growth potential, and perform integration with third-party services, among other things. When working with an established product, software developer consultants lose the ‘home field advantage’ – rather than building out a product for somebody else and knowing everything about it from top to bottom, they’re jumping into the shoes of your development team while also performing a consultant’s regular duties.

Evaluating Your Pain Points and Use Case

No matter how well any business is doing or how happy a user is with a service, there will always be pain points. Even if things are going well on paper, they could always be going better. Identifying areas where your business could improve is the most vital part of deciding whether you want to bring in a consultant at all, and what they should do once they’re on the job. In the software world especially, it is imperative that a successful business know its product and their audience well enough to see a gap that can be filled. This, of course, isn’t always easy.

Many business pain points in the software industry make themselves known with no shortage of persistence and pointedness. Even so, it’s not uncommon to see a business that’s doing well on the whole, but whose leaders have no clue why they’re struggling so hard to break into the next stage of growth. The problem could lie with team synergy, market direction, product positioning, user experience, or even something as core as what the product is aiming to do and who it’s aiming to do it for.

The best way to see these principles in the field is to look at testimonials for software development consulting companies. Seeing how consultants helped successful companies to take the next step in growth can help you think through where your growth may lie. For example, a software consulting company called Directive Consulting, which works with a large number of big-name clients like Sysco, helped data integration giant Matillon to optimize their SEO strategy. This led to a 650% year-on-year increase in blog traffic, among other benefits, which all had the same effect; getting more eyes on their business. With Matillon already enjoying massive success at the time, the presence of this potential growth channel wasn’t exactly a lit beacon; it took a software developer consultant’s keen eye to see and tap that potential.

In another case study, consultant firm e-Zest helped an undisclosed, already successful mobile solutions company to build a modular smart case solution that could be scaled out to different mobile platforms and devices with ease. The firm not only helped bring the concept to life with flexible SDK development but also suggested an API licensing model to help their client bring desired functions to the product line without bloating costs and delaying development. Left to their own devices, the client would have been forced to either develop redundant solutions that address use cases already addressed in the market, or spend time researching what APIs to license.

In a review pulled from Clutch.co, reThought insurance needed support on their insurance application as their user base was growing. In order to support the growth, CodeFutures provided the software consultants to set up and maintain the architecture changes needed for the new capacity. CodeFutures employees even traveled to the data centers to help set up server racks, wiring, switches, and so on.

As you’ve seen here, the right partner can help you uncover pain points you didn’t know you had, or solve particularly ugly ones in an elegant fashion. Thanks to being an outside party, third-party consultants are able to analyze the way a business runs without the bias and limited perspective that comes from being on the inside. This results in an objective, top-to-bottom data set with tangible metrics on things like customer success, software optimization, employee efficiency, and potential market growth. If any of these things sound like areas where your company could see high ROI with improvement, bringing in an outside party with the right experience is almost certainly the right move.

What Makes a Good Software Development Consulting Company?

While experience and pedigree are as good a way to spot great companies as they are in any other industry, there’s a lot more that goes into software development consulting. Any good consultant will be an expert in all levels of their chosen industry, and software is no different; what you’re looking for is a company that brings together experienced professionals from all levels and facets of the industry. In software development, you want to hire a consulting firm whose staff includes former code monkeys, sales analysts, bloggers, executives, and department managers, to name a few.

Without going over staff rosters and checking out the LinkedIn of every staff member in the firms you’re looking to partner with, of course, you’re not going to find an ideal match for your business and project by those standards. Besides, if you had that kind of time to waste, you probably wouldn’t be looking to hire a consulting firm at all. That said, taking a good, hard look at a company’s history, testimonials, and history can help you sort the best from the rest with minimal effort.

One dead giveaway that an outfit has the kind of varied staff that would make it a good fit for a wide range of clients is that they already have exactly that; clients with a wide variety of specializations, business needs, and project types. Sure, you may be eager to hire a firm that’s worked well with Cisco, Verizon, and the US Federal Communications Commission, just on the sheer strength of their pedigree. The thing is, such a specialized client list is evidence of a narrow niche, and if you don’t fit into that niche, you’re not going to have an optimal partnership. Instead, if you’re looking for something more general or looking to grow your business in new directions, seek out a firm that’s done work with big names, or even medium names, in a variety of industries.

e-Zest, a company already mentioned in this write-up, is one such company. They’ve built applications related to farming, data analytics, dynamic pricing for sales, automated purchasing for a pharmaceutical company, and remote infrastructure management, to name a few of their accomplishments. While they don’t tend to name their clients, the variety of successful case studies speaks to a wide net in terms of specialization. This, of course, is the mark of a well-rounded team.

If you’re unwilling to compromise and want the biggest and best, be prepared to spend a bit more and do a bit more research to find the right partner. Companies in the upper echelons of the software development consulting world often have client lists long and prestigious enough to draw envy and put them on a pedestal in their space. CodeFutures, for example, started out building databases and branched out to other products and services. This eventually led to them landing contracts with the likes of Siemens, Disney, Wells Fargo, Verizon, and even Google. If a company stands as proof that even the largest outfits can benefit from bringing on a software developer consultant, there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to help you out with whatever project or growth-chasing venture you may have in mind.

Naturally, it’s still up to you and your partners and stakeholders to evaluate the company and, if you contact them, what they have to say. The discovery phase is when you’ll learn the most about your new partner, and in some cases, will be when you’ll figure out that their vision doesn’t match yours and bid them farewell. This can mean investing substantial time and money to find the right partner, but it will almost certainly prove worthwhile in the end. Going with a celebrated outfit with history all over the business world may cost more upfront, but it’s a good option if you’re short on time and have the available cash; the company will, with near-certainty, be able to at least point you in the right direction and get you moving.

In The End

With the right consulting company in the mix, your development cycle will look drastically different than it would with the wrong firm in place or no outside help at all. Your brainstorming phase will become much more informed, the development will be more streamlined, and product rollout will be smoother. Customer success metrics will be much easier to relate to specific aspects of the business, lending you both direction and relative agility.

Choosing the right consultant or firm is all about finding the best fit for both where your business is right now, and where you want it to be. Both specialization and scale come into play, especially from a budgetary standpoint. If you’ve got the cash and staff, though, bigger is normally better; there’s nothing wrong with aiming for the moon if you’ve got the resources to take the shot, especially with an expert archer standing by to help you.