For an ISV or an Independent Software Vendor, the key to success is having a loyal customer base, innovative products, and consistent top-line growth.
Top individual software developers significantly invest to drive collaboration, quality, and customer-centricity. The software development return on investment is linked closely to those attributes.
There is tough competition in the software development market, with so many service providers competing to provide the best services to hundreds of thousands of clients anywhere in the world.
For individual software vendors, the struggle to stay on the competitive edge is real. Most of them operate with smaller development teams that consist of expert resources.
Boost the ROI of a Software Development Project
For an independent software development company, there are key components that help boost the software development return on investment.
1. Customer-Centric
The ability to serve, win, and retain clients by providing software development solutions of high quality is the main objective of an independent software development vendor.
Nevertheless, making certain of the customer loyalty in the era of start-ups, the changing expectations, and digital disruption is not easy. The point of view is what separates the laggards from the leaders.
Rather than concentrating on fulfilling the immediate needs of a customer, leading vendors anticipate the customer demands.
The insights could help drive enhancements in existing products, which enable customers to achieve their business goals. By helping customers drive their business strategy, individual software vendors could become strategic partners.
2. Culture
To beat the competition, you have to stay ahead of the curve by taking innovative products faster than your competitors, responding to customer demands nimbly and delivering quality products and services.
All of these are closely interwoven with the culture of the organization and the people. Creating a culture of quality, collaboration promotion across industry participants, and adopting Agile and DevOps methodologies, all could reinforce your top-line growth.
For an independent custom software development company, being able to deliver quality software that meets client goals could create a loyal customer base. This could mean more up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, good word-of-mouth, and better customer retention. All of which translates to growth revenue.
For example, joining forces with an expert cyber-security software company could add unique features to your product. It also promotes collaboration among teams within your company. From coders, testers, to functional leads, all should work hand-in-hand to ensure a smooth SDLC or software development lifecycle, which leads to better utilization of resources and continuous enhancement.
DevOps is not a buzzword; it signifies a dramatic cultural shift towards open-mindedness, people-centricity, clear communication between teams, and accountability. Moreover, it ensures that the development, operations, and QA work towards a common goal—which is to efficiently and quickly deliver defect-free software.
3. Expense
The expense or the cost plays a vital role in determining software development ROI. If you need to take on-board a team of ten professionals, the mix should be like this:
- One to two very experienced solution architects.
- Five major developers.
- Three to four seniors who have mid-level experience.
Outsource, non-critical, repetitive activities of a part of the development work to free up the team to engage with customers, collecting of business requirements, and drive innovation to quickly scale products.
To alleviate costs, consider embracing the SaaS or Software-as-a-Service format. It doesn’t only enable the development team to remotely collaborate and work, it also loses the capital expenses needed to procure costly IT infrastructure.
Increase Software Development ROI with Scrum
Scrum, being an agile approach to software development project management has gained a big relevance nowadays. There are many independent software vendors who are aware of Scrum and know how to increase efficiency. Check out the following considerations.
Overhead Costs Should Not Rule the Development Process
Boosting your software development ROI greatly depends on your ability of managing your finances and handling organization assets.
A big number of software entrepreneurs, surprisingly, don’t fail due to the lack of genius in their product. Rather, it’s the discrepancies in making investments a priority.
Factors such as technology, talent, and infrastructure, which should come first? The whole process suffers once the overhead expenses and back office costs start flooding in, which make it almost impossible to see the light of profits at the end of the tunnel.
Never Jeopardize Quality for Higher Returns
For your ROI potential, there are two major elements—gain from investment and the cost of investment. It should be clear that success and profits could be achieved only through a sound business judgement. Any business proposal should be measured first for its potential to bring efficiency, speed, and innovation.
For business owners, it’s critical to ensure that each cost savings and investment is helping instead of hindering the ultimate product quality goal and the speed to market. Ideally, ROI should be directly proportionate to the product idea and the value it provides customers.
Don’t Allow Inferior Infrastructure Ruin Your Effort
Optimizing IT services and operations, organizations were able to build a more efficient and scalable IT infrastructure, and lower costs by ten to thirty percent.
An infrastructure that is more efficient enables IT staff to lessen the operation costs by as much as fifty percent and deliver faster services with better quality.
So, what makes a software development effort efficiently optimized and giving the best ROI? The answer is talent, technology, and infrastructure.
The key is to find the right talent pool, the technology that best fits the software requirement, and the right infrastructure that not only boosts the performance of the product, but also enables faster time to market.
Conclusion
Measuring the return on investment of a software development project may not be easy to calculate, but as an independent software vendor, you should try your best to do it.
Even if you predict a modest ROI, you should end up covering the development cost and benefit from the business process created due to it.
As specifically mentioned, Scrum is a great approach to boosting your software development business ROI. A DevOps process is extremely helpful as well.
When providing software development services, being an independent software vendor, you should make certain not to compromise on quality to increase your return on investment.
Read Also:
- 7 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Software Development
- Why Flutter Development is Considered the Trend in 2021?
- The demand for Cross-Platform App Development is Growing Exponentially
Author Bio:
Sara Walker is a business analyst at Tatvasoft – a Custom Software Development Company. She loves to write more about technology, software development, artificial intelligence, machine learning. She spends her free time by reading and watching technology blogs and podcasts..
