Categories: Custom Software

How to Write an Efficient RFP

By: OmniSpearPosted on
Ask A Developer Feature Article
A regular column featuring answers from the team at OmniSpear

The benefits of having a system customized to your business workflow are often motivating factors in deciding to hire a custom development team to reorganize your business workflow and improve operations. We often find that one of the biggest challenges of hiring a custom software development shop to build your application is ensuring the development team understands your business’s needs and how the application will be used by your team. 

To help bring each of the teams together to reach an end goal of developing a custom application that is functional and efficient, we recommend working with a good in-house business analyst or hiring a development shop that provides that service as a part of their process. A business analyst will capture your business requirements, clarify needs and expectations, and write practical use cases that represent the way your team will use the software. After your team agrees to the requirements and use cases, the business analyst will work collaboratively with the lead developer on your project to design the system architecture, database and technology stack that best serves your needs.

Without this critical step of translating the application design into terms familiar to the entire team, along with clear direction and team synergy the final application may not be exactly what your team was hoping for. Whether the project is fixed-bid or hourly, any good development team is committed to efficiently coding the application and without thoroughly defined use cases, their commitment to code-efficiency could motivate developers to streamline the application, often resulting in the loss of critical workflow features. While technically meeting functionality requirements, the overall usefulness of the application to your business is lost.

When scoping projects and putting together your next RFP it is critical to outline clear needs for your application, put together thorough use cases and be upfront with needs and expectations with your development team. Our development team has 100+ years of combined experience over 35 projects. We’d be happy to work with your team and are committed to supporting our clients through each phase of the development process.

Have a question? Email info@omnispear.com for answers from the OmniSpear team.

Practice Making Money, Not Spending Money

By: OmniSpearPosted on

Basecamp CEO Jason Fried talks about taking an “intentionally small” approach to building a business for the long-term on a recent episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.

Listening to Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on a recent episode of Recode Decode, we’re inspired to think differently about our relationships with our custom software development clients.

In the interview, Fried talks with Swisher about being intentionally small and the risk of growing too big, too fast.  Losing money for years to fuel fast growth is accepted, even expected. Fried’s warning: “By the time you finally need to actually make money, you don’t have any skills. You don’t know how to make money because all you know how to do is spend it.”

Listen to the whole podcast or skip to minute 35:30 to hear the discussion about being intentionally small and focusing on intentional growth.

Whether you’re launching a new business or growing a small one, you’ll be spending money on infrastructure.  In today’s world, some or most of that will be invested in custom software — even if you’re not a technology company. How you schedule that investment can make a difference.

OmniSpear has experience growing profitably since 2001.  And we’re open to talking about scaling that giant custom software project into a series of smaller projects to fit within your intentional growth budget. Listen. Develop. Deliver.

Contact OmniSpear for your custom software development needs.