A SMART approach to smarter, collaborative software development: collaboration meets technical expertise

Loving what you do is vital for building bespoke software. And we mean loving what you do. To deliver lasting, powerful, future-proof software, it’s essential to be invested in the industry and business you’re building products for; because software success doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Welcome to the era of deeply collaborative software development.

For many, outsourcing is the chosen approach to build bespoke software when the necessary expertise and resources can’t be found in-house. But this approach comes with two major caveats that affect the value of the software that’s created:

Relinquishing control of your finely tuned vision. An outsourced consultancy project might be a finely-honed machine – but it’s their machine. Often, your initial vision, requirements and technology preferences will be explored at the beginning of the project, before it slowly edges away from those important fundamentals and gets closer to the consultancy’s interpretation of what ‘good’ looks like.

A project delivered, not a product. Most consultancies think of software in projects and this is a problem. Because projects have a beginning and an end, whereas software needs constant development and iteration, especially when it comes to cloud-native solutions. If your approach is project based, then your goal is to wrap something up within an agreed timeline, take your expertise and move onto the next project. But this leaves the business with a software solution that is essentially static, bound to rules established when the project ended. What’s really needed is a software product that has its own lifecycle that can continue to develop after the 3rd party has finished the initial phase of development and deployment.

Experts in becoming experts

Context is vital for successful software development. And that’s where we need you. Collaboration underpins our ability to learn about you, your industry, your business, your technologies and the pressures that you face. Once we’re aligned, then we have all the knowledge necessary to build something that delivers across these important aspects. That process doesn’t end once we start the building phase either; it remains an ongoing process throughout our work.

Agile development

Product owners need reliable planning input in order to succeed. To put this in place, we believe that agile is the only way to keep product development on track, continuously focusing and readjusting development activity to stay aligned with the objectives and milestones of the project – as well as emerging issues.

Agile also extends to clients themselves. It’s not just our approach, but an operating model across everybody involved in the project. By ensuring our agile approach is universal, it means a better level of alignment with customer roadmaps, requirements and stakeholder responsibility.

This ensures that we assume product responsibility in tandem with our clients, working closely in alignment.