How do we deliver Custom Software that boosts your Business Success?

Not that long ago IT Industry had been known from delivering large, long-lasting, expensive projects. It was a market standard and a driver for creating big & complex software products, targeting to be “flexible solutions” which can fit to every organization. What appeared in practice – those “flexible solutions” needed to be adjusted to organizations with… large, long-lasting, expensive projects. And what is even worse, the inflexible areas of those products forced the unforeseen and not always welcome changes in structure and processed of organizations which adopted them. Why?

Why build is better than buy?

There are two main reasons on why out-of-the-box solutions tend to generate significant challenges:

• First: Conway Law & out-of-the-box solutions flexibility. Conway Law is a well-proven principle, which relates to how structure of the organization influences the shape of software architecture: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.[”. The Conway Law also works in reverse mode. So, if your software is not flexible enough to adjust to the organization… the organization will most probably adjust to the software. This is a significant business decision to be made – and yet a lot of organizations are not even aware of it, allowing product architecture to unconsciously change the way how business operates.
• Second: implementing unique business processes pre-shaped products has its limitations. Successful business is driven by non-standard, innovative, outside of the box processes & value streams – which are not foreseen by out-of-the-box solutions. Implementing it within such products introduces a complex piece of architecture to be designed, delivered and maintained. Pareto rule here is accurate – 20% of functionalities can consume 80% time of the Software Project.

So… should we totally resign from buying out-of-the-box products? No! Many business areas, which are necessary for a successful business, but do not introduce innovation – can be supported well by software products available on the market. E-commerce startup probably don’t require unique payroll business processes – and predefined processes implemented in dedicated payroll systems can do the work. What matters is to deeply analyze what are the key differentiators and innovation which our Company brings to the market – within those domains, building dedicated software is the only strategy which will allow the Business to grow uninterrupted by technology, but boosted with it instead. 

Inspired by Gartner’s Pace-Layer Architecture Strategy, we recommend building Software which boosts innovation and differentiation. Buying out-of-the-box solutions will bring limitations to the areas, which defines competitive advantage and value proposition which Company brings to the market.

How we approach Bespoke Solutions in BlueSoft

Building Custom Solutions is nothing new in IT Industry – in fact, this approach is rapidly growing within software development strategies among many different markets. And yet, Custom Solutions delivery may also introduce some troubles – where most if not all of them comes from understanding between the Customer and a Vendor of a Custom Solution.

Common practice in building a Custom Solutions before Agile & Microservices Revolution was to outsource its creation to Vendors or Internal IT. Business, with support of IT Analysts, had been created a list of requirements and process designs, which then had been transferred into the hands of Delivery Team. The requestors had seen the results in the end of the project. This had two main challenges:

• First – a result was a better-fit to the organization than the out-of-the-box solution and brought more flexibility. However, very often this flexibility had been interrupted by how analysts understood the initial need, not what this need really was.
• Second – a Custom Software, even with a better fit to the organization than out-of-the-box one, very often required more time to be released for the Customer. In many cases it was too late – business-case required faster delivery, which resulted in buying instead of building, producing the debt of inflexibility, license costs or misalignment with IT Architecture.

Fortunately – in BlueSoft we are aware that building Bespoke Solutions is not only about the Technology & Scope of the project – but mostly on understanding the Business to support it with proper Software. We have noticed and combined three areas which needs to play as one Unit to deliver Bespoke Software which really changes the game: Flexible Architecture (Custom++), Analytical Framework (Minimum Awesome Product) and the Mature Agile Team: 

Old-fashioned Custom Software delivery was focused on unique, organization-specific list of requirements and features. The new approach, which we run in BlueSoft, is enhanced with a business-oriented Team who knows how the Product is expected to enhance Organization’s Market Advantage. With Bespoke Solutions delivered by BlueSoft, you don’t need to specify list of requirements for your Software – you just need to express what this software is about to bring to the table. And this needs our Team will map to Minimum Awesome Product! All those aspects influence not only the Value which software delivers – but also the timing of release and feedback gathering methodologies.

As a summary – here is a comparison between how we approach Custom Solutions with Value-Oriented Mindset, traditional Custom solutions delivery focused on Project Scope – and Out-of-the-box solutions.