Software Development Consultancy Meaning and How It Can Help Your Business

Software development consulting is increasingly in demand due to digitalization, which has gained momentum in recent years. Many companies now follow the motto “Go digital or go home.” As a result, the demand for IT services has grown exponentially. Companies looking for help with IT turn to software development consulting services more often due to the convenience and cost-effectiveness of this model.

In this article, we’ll cover all you need to know about software development and consulting. You’ll learn the main pros and cons of this approach, the benefits for business, and the steps you should take before hiring a company to deliver those services.

Software development consulting stands for providing expert IT knowledge to companies to suggest a solution to their problems. Such consulting helps businesses optimize their processes, implement modern technologies, and achieve their strategic goals effectively.

Software development consulting services can help companies that need an outside, unbiased opinion on a decision related to technologies. This opinion is provided by software consultants.

Besides expert advice, a consulting company can often provide the necessary IT services to implement the recommended solution in the business.

The main role of a software consultant is to recommend an optimal technical solution to help businesses solve problems and achieve their goals. However, the responsibilities of a software development consultant aren’t limited to recommendations alone. They include:

• Gathering business information and requirements. Consultants need to know everything about the business they assist. This includes business scope, industry, workflow, and other aspects.
• Recommending a suitable implementation. Based on the gathered data, the consultant must select a solution that will best suit the company in terms of available resources.
• Collaborating with developers and coordinating the development process. If the solution requires development from scratch, the software development consultant teams up with the development team to oversee the entire development process and transfer the correct vision of the final product.
• Testing solutions for correct work. The developed solution must work as intended and be smoothly integrated into the company's business processes. The consultant tests the final product with QA software engineering experts to deliver a bug-free software solution.

Software development consultancy can cover a large amount of software needs to help your startup to be successful. It includes various types of consulting, where each type solves problems related to it. Let’s look at the main goals of hiring a software development consultant:

• Digital transformation. Transform your business in the digital part, capitalizing on new technologies or creating a reliable digital strategy.
• Expert guidance for growth. IT consult experts can help you with growth by providing high-quality digital consulting.
• Overcome industry difficulties. You may need technology consulting if you want to solve industry-related challenges and follow your short-term and long-term objectives.
• Custom solutions for success. If you need to analyze your business strategy and emerging issues, you design and develop a result-oriented solution to increase performance and revenue by solution.
• Streamline strategy and vision. IT strategy consulting will give you effective software analysis to help you solve industry-specific challenges, ensuring that every aspect is aligned with your business goals.

Designing and developing a product and transferring your vision is essential for each starting entrepreneur, and startup consulting will help you with it.

Furthermore, software development consulting also provides a strategy for legacy soft modernization, which helps to update your outdated IT systems by incorporating advanced technology to reduce operating costs, respond to market changes, and increase ROI.

Now that you know what software development consulting is all about, you may understand that it is very useful firstly for companies. Such consulting helps reveal and cope with problems by analyzing and suggesting ways. It’s time to list the benefits that businesses get from hiring a software development consultant.

After you’ve discussed the requirements of a new software stack and business goals with consultants, they can start developing a strategy with goal achievement in mind. That being said, careful planning of this process is also an essential step.

The consultant set priorities to create a clear technology implementation plan that doesn’t interrupt existing business operations and aimed to introduce new technologies as soon as possible.

Software development consultancy can help businesses optimize and utilize their resources more efficiently. By analyzing your current processes and identifying inefficiencies, consultants can recommend cost-effective solutions eligible for your business goals. It can include open-source technologies, automating tasks, or improving workflows to reduce costs.

Consultants can help avoid unnecessary expenses, such as over-investing in tools or technologies that don’t approach long-term business plans. By choosing software development consultancy, businesses can save funds and move them to areas with higher potential for growth.

One of the top software development consultancy goals is to help keep pace with technological advances. Technology doesn’t stand still, and if your business doesn’t implement modern technologies in the workflows, it’ll become much more challenging to compete with rivals. Custom software development consultants assist businesses in technology selection and implementation to help them save money in the long term. Besides, if your staff isn’t tech-savvy, software development services consultants take on the responsibility of training personnel to work with a newly implemented solution.

Software development consultancy helps you identify potential risks while you implement new technologies or if you have systems you need to maintain. They provide thorough reviews to reveal vulnerabilities, such as security gaps, compliance issues, or system downtime risks.

Consultancy services provide building software strategies to minimize these risks, which guarantee reliable system performance. Also, they help create contingency plans so businesses can quickly address unexpected problems and maintain operational stability. Such an approach guards businesses from costly errors and interruptions and gives a more secure and efficient development process.

Right software development consulting services consume developing solutions with scalability in mind, guaranteeing that your systems can be scalable with your business. They create architectures that adapt to changing needs without significant overhauls.

In addition, consultants focus on the future and recommend technologies and practices that remain relevant while trends evolve. Also, it will be helpful in the long term to save time and costs in your organization and assure that investments in technology are a cause of future development and the sustenance of an organization's competitiveness.

Software development consulting services provide a multi-step process. Consultants get acquainted with the client's business requirements, offer a solution to achieve business goals, sometimes develop it, and provide post-release support. Each point of this cycle should be considered in more detail to clarify the overall service process.

The Solution Design Worksop stage aims to connect your business needs with a consulting view. At this phase, the consulting team actively listens to you and your business challenges and tailors its IT offerings to align with your goals. At Cleveroad, this stage is free of charge. We have a separate dedicated Solution Team. The team consists of certified business experts, experienced solution developers, and creative designers with consulting expertise. We’ll form a team with domain knowledge to adhere to your goals and product development cycle requirements.

Let’s look at the main goals of the Solution Design Workshop:

• Understand the problems you want to solve with your business
• Define functional scope
• Offer a tech solution
• Estimate the required development efforts

Talking about the time, the stage takes a different time depending on the project. Usually, it is 2 weeks.

It’s impossible to come up with a tech strategy and proceed to the software development life cycle throughout the software case study of the client's business. The discovery phase helps consultants get acquainted with the business they’re going to work with.

During this phase, consultants meet with the client to collect information about the business, gather requirements, and analyze its pain points. All this data will help consultants find the perfect solution that suits business goals and needs.

All information and requirements are packed into a specification containing all the project's features and technologies, which greatly simplifies communication between business and developers. Without customer approval of the specification, further stages can’t start.

The last stage of this phase is the choice of how a recommended solution will be implemented. A consultant can rely on their management skills and team up with the client’s development team to manage the development process. Another option is to select a current software consulting and development company as the main IT service provider to customize the solution from scratch.

When the strategic plan is ready, software development consulting brings the implementation of changes and suggestions into real life. It includes implementing new tools or technologies, workflows to go with the strategy, and providing many software modernization solutions.

The strategy implementation stage requires the vendor to set up workflows and provide clear communication channels between the client and the consulting team. Regular progress reviews consume the process and adhere to the agreed goals and timelines. By the end of this stage, you’ll have a transparent and actionable roadmap that guides the entire software development process, whether it is web development, mobile, or anything else.

Сonsultants monitor the effectiveness of implemented solutions by analyzing whether the strategy is working effectively and improving it. They enhance performance and usability based on different aspects, such as KPI or how well the project is progressing. Also, they ensure tests to ensure the enterprise software architecture adheres to quality software standards.

Moreover, consultants may provide training sessions for the client’s team to ensure they can efficiently use and maintain the new system. They consult in the area of improvement and scalability and provide solutions that will be robust for long-term success, keeping the business competitive.

Before you start looking for a company that provides IT consulting services, you need to choose where to look for it. It’s crucial not to neglect this since the price of cloud services or another, the convenience of communication, and software project management depend on the vendor’s location. You have a choice between three types of outsourcing cooperation models: onshore, nearshore, and offshore.

The distinguishing feature of onshore companies is that they’re located in the same country as you. The vendor may be located in another city or state, but most importantly, it’s within your country’s borders.

This is a pretty convenient option since there are no cultural differences and no time-zone gap.

On the other hand, this kind of outsourcing can hit your pocket hard, especially if you live in the USA, Australia, or Canada. According to Clutch and GoodFirms, the average hourly rate can start from $150 and above in these regions.

Nearshore development companies are located in your country’s neighborhood, and often, the time interval between your and the vendor's country is no more than 1-3 hours. For example, you live in Poland, and you can use dedicated development team services in Estonia or Germany.

This option is quite cost-effective compared to onshore. For example, in Estonia, the hourly rate doesn’t exceed $50-$80, in Germany - $80-$100, while in the U.S., it is $120+.

Offshore companies aren’t only located in other countries but also in other regions, and there can be a considerable time difference. For example, your company is located in Washington, USA, and you use IT staff augmentation services from Tallinn, Estonia, to work on the project. In this case, prepare for a serious time zone difference since the working day in Estonia starts at 9:00 AM, while in Washington, it’s only 1:00 AM.

The significant advantage of this outsourcing company type is a huge selection of companies from all over the world. As a result, it’s very easy to find a company that suits your project best. Also, the big time zone differences will not be a problem, as professional software vendors know how to deal with this problem. For example, we at Cleverod address time zone differences by scheduling meetings at a time convenient for all stakeholders, maintaining constant communication in Slack, and organizing sprint reviews to keep the client informed about the project's success. Such an approach negates the big time zone differences.

Now it’s time to talk about how to approach software development consulting and succeed.

Before you start looking for a good software consulting services company, you should do a little homework, namely, determine the project requirements and business goals you want to achieve. You must clearly answer the following questions:

• What is the problem facing the business?
• In what way or solution do you want to fix it?
• What should be in the solution to meet the business requirements?

Knowing the answers simplifies further negotiations with representatives of consulting companies.

The next step is to search for companies that provide comprehensive software development solutions. They can be easily found using specialized platforms such as Clutch, GoodFirms IT Firms, and others. They collect data about IT companies from all over the world and catalog it for easier searching.

When searching, pay attention to companies’ portfolios, how software development projects are completed, which development strategies are implemented, and the types of software application development they previously worked on. Their consulting requires exercise and the capability to be agile. All of such parts of the experience of a technology consulting partner must contain software development consulting. This approach will give you a clear picture of whether the company is suitable for your task or if it is better to look for another one.

To ensure the quality of our services, you can see testimonials from our customers on our Clutch page.

Software development consultancy vendors should provide an appropriate level of communication. It should be clear and seamless because the consultant’s understanding of the specific needs and goals of the consulting project is vital for the solution's success.

Clear communication helps to build a close relationship between the client and executor. It guarantees better adherence to your company's expectations. Such an approach offers better results and higher chances of success. We at Cleveroad prioritize transparent communication and are always ready to discuss a project with the client company to find solutions to challenges and increase success rates.

Another important part of your interaction with the vendor is setting the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Let's discuss examples of KPIs to assess the effectiveness of the software consultant's work:

• Project milestone completion. Percentage of project milestones completed on time.
• Resolution time. The average time taken to resolve IT issues or tickets.
• Client satisfaction. Customer satisfaction score from feedback surveys.
• System uptime. Percentage of system uptime achieved during consultancy.
• Budget adherence. The extent to which the project stays within the allocated budget.
• Knowledge transfer. Number of training sessions conducted or documentation provided.

KPIs are an essential way to ensure that a software development consulting firm adheres to your goals. They help you see your successes and failures, and thanks to them, you can prevent probable mistakes.

Cleveroad is a professional software development and consulting company headquartered in Central and Eastern Europe. It is one of the most famous outsourcing destinations due to its reasonable software creation rates. We are a company with 13+ years of experience, 250+ qualified in-house engineers, and 200+ successful projects, always ready to help our clients.

By choosing Cleveroad, you will get the following benefits:

• Free Solution Workshop stage to connect your business needs with technical implementation
• Implementing ISO 9001 quality management systems and ISO 27001 security standards as an ISO-certified company.
• As Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Tier Partner within the AWS Partner Network (APN), we provide a high level of expertise and proficiency in providing cloud consulting and development.
• Ensuring all guarantees for your business information security and confidentiality by signing NDA per your request.
• We have R&D centers in the US, Norway, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine.