What’s different about a custom application development projects, a primer for small businesses

Last week I talked about how small businesses couldn’t afford to invest in technology projects that didn’t show immediate returns. I offered that 30 days is the outer limit of acceptable time to implementation.

So how does a small business get anything meaningful done within 30 days?

Automate a specific business activity that you already do and understand. Automate just that activity. This will help you get something that can show an immediate return for your business because it will have a clearly defined purpose. This may seem kind of hard to understand, or confusing. If it does it’s probably because we’re so used to buying packaged software, which is commonly referred to as “Commercial Off the Shelf Software”.

Naturally this becomes an acronym COTS because computer concepts seem to get acronyms quicker than, well, anything I can think of.

COTS is targeted to many customers in many different business environments. Most small businesses only have experience buying this kind of prepackaged software, and so really struggle with purchasing custom developed software. For many business applications COTS software is just fine because the costs of buying it and deploying it can be very low compared to custom application development.

Custom application development is completely different from buying software off the shelf and implementing it. In this post I’ll talk about the three biggest mistakes that small businesses make when they approach custom application development projects as if they were buying off the shelf software.

These three mistakes are based on approaching custom software developers with these questions:

• We’re used to buying software from a catalog and making it work, why can’t we just treat this like that?
• We can’t decide what features are really going to be useful so why don’t we just ask for everything and then see what we can afford?

• Finally the biggest mistake everyone makes. We don’t want to spend alot of time on this internally so can you just build for us what everyone else in our business asks you to build so we can spend as little time on it as possible?

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