We start by coming to an agreement of how success will be measured. Then, we work to understand your current processes, how people interact with your software and where there is opportunity for improvement. From there, we create a project plan that’s tied directly with your needs and fits into your unique situation.
We know custom software isn’t cheap, but we also know growing companies that employ tailor-made solutions have a unique competitive edge in their market. Our goal at the end of each project is to have you up and running on your new system quickly so you can start seeing a return on your investment.
With custom software, your customers and your employees are now your end-users. During the process, we’ll be engaging with them to ensure that we’re creating an experience that’s easy-to-use and accomplishes their goals quickly and efficiently.
Most of the lifelong cost of a custom application is in the ongoing enhancements/maintenance and the infrastructure associated costs. Luckily, we’re with you for the long run. We’ll host, maintain and manage your system to keep it operating efficiently so you can see long-term cost savings and keep your systems operational over their lifespan.
OUR PROCESS
APPROACH – Pre-Project Consulting
When you reach out to us about your software project, the first thing we do is listen and ask questions. We learn about your business and your project in order to understand your needs and determine whether PiSoft is a good fit for you. If we think we can help you, we’ll work with you to set a responsible budget, develop a project brief and a proposal.
The project brief serves as a high-level description of your project and a corresponding schedule and budget range. We use early project requirements, historical data from previous projects, and our expertise to initially estimate cost. At this point, we will provide you with a rough estimate. As we learn more about the project and its requirements, we will refine our costs till we come to an agreement with our final proposal.
If you’re coming to us with an already existing code base then we’ll start out by going through a live demonstration of what’s been built so far. We’ll then conduct a formal code audit and prepare a “takeover plan” and road-map to get your software in good shape.
- PLAN - Discovery, Design & Planning
- BUILD – Custom Software Development
- MANTAIN – Release, Host & Support
Your project starts long before we write any code. Coding focuses on technologies and programming languages, but preparing for a software project involves the larger process of understanding your business, how you’ll measure return on investment, user needs, potential risks and future opportunities. We’ll do this collaboratively – through discussion, sketching out workflows, and deciding on solutions. The best part of all is that we don’t require you to learn our language or have any expertise, we communicate in yours.
Most of projects hit bottlenecks, runaway costs or other misfortunes but not in PiSoft. We’ll remove all the guesswork upfront so you can de-risk your software project and accelerate its development. Before a line of code is ever written, we will get face-to-face to gain a deeper understanding of your business, design any required UIs, lay out the requirements, and create a project plan to prevent any slippages, false starts, or wasting money on features that won’t get used.
Once we understand the problem and agree on the right solution, we’ll define the features that will be supported in the core application and create an accurate cost and schedule estimate for your software project.
All of our design and development practices are aimed at producing maintainable, extensible, and highly reusable software. We begin with the most essential features, so we deliver most of the value early-on.
We believe that custom software isn’t just for the big corporations. By building only what’s needed, you can affordably create custom-fit web and mobile applications that will enable your business to scale faster for the years to come. We can build exactly what you need from scratch, takeover an existing code base, or even rescue a failed project from other vendors or freelancers.
You hired us to build your software in order to make or save money. Until it’s released, software can’t do either. We help you determine the required infrastructure, licensing and distribution mechanisms for your system. For example, whether it’s internal, shared, dedicated or cloud infrastructure our expertise is available to you, so you can get your software safely deployed and responsibly hosted.
Our goal is to keep you focused on growing your business while we worry about delivering the tools you need to become a technology leader. Whether you’re a startup or a growing company, we’re available for the long-term to maintain and extend your application’s lifetime, value and usefulness.
We’ll protect your investment, keep your infrastructure running smoothly 24/7, and give your users something they can rely on every day. With straightforward pricing and proactive support, we handle hosting for our clients and support thousands of users daily. This includes: ongoing feature enhancements and bug fixes, server setup and OS updates, performance optimization, security monitoring and protection, nightly backups, and compliance requirements.