How to keep an edge of the competition in information technology consulting?
We combine a design-first approach with agile methods to build quality digital products that are aligned with your business goals.
To capture customers’ ideas in full, we need to understand their target market, size of the opportunity, existing platforms, customer acquisition plans and monetisation models. We make sure that our clients understand the value of their idea and have realistic expectations about the entire process. This process helps us clarify the client's expectations and our role as a contractor.
Once the discovery phase is complete and our client is ready to pursue their idea, we start with the app design/wireframe process. We try to capture and visualise all their application requirements and create requirements for design layouts. During this interactive phase, we will define all the functionality and features of the application.
Wireframes are typically a low-fidelity, bare-bones blueprint, represented with grey boxes and placeholders for detailed content. A good wireframe should explain:
Once the designs and mock-ups are signed off, we move onto building the application. Based on the customer requirements, we will select the right tools. Our experienced software architects lead this process to determine the app's architecture, tools to be used, person-hours required for each phase and maintenance requirements. The most important question for the system architect is to determine the usage requirements and how to build a technology stack that scales well.
The system designer must select the proper tools for the front end, server-side and databases. Front-end options can vary from picking simple front-end frameworks (Bootstrap, Bulma, Materialise) to JavaScript Front-end Frameworks (React, Angular, Vue). We choose the language, such as PHP, Python, Ruby or Node.js, for server-side programming.
We choose between the native vs hybrid platforms. JAVA, Kotlin, Swift, Objective C are examples of native languages to build Android or iOS Apps. We can use hybrid frameworks like React Native and Ionic for hybrid applications. Again, the choice is dependent upon the complexity of the application and scaling goals. Our experienced system architects determines all of this.
Following, we start our coding and development process. We use an agile development framework with frequent iterations often and test extensively. We involve the client for testing and feedback of the various components in the building process.
We try to keep our clients engaged as early in the process as we can. We get their feedback at each step and guide them through the process to clearly understand where the project is. Usually, a project manager will look after this process. The project manager's task is to get the details from the correct department and then translate it to our customer in a manner that is understandable and actionable. For this kind of interaction, we use various channels and are open to the customer’s preference. In general, Skype, Slack, Discord are the most preferred and frequently used.
A small number of our clients will choose to deploy applications themselves. Although generally with complex applications, customers engage us in helping them with the process.
