My Service Offerings - Application Engineering Consultant
I have worked all my life in Offshore Outsourcing Model and also a consultant in onsite. I understand the software business nuances and my following services are aimed at maximizing the returns for the software you make
1. Reduce and Optimize your product costs
Protect yourself from Jacked Up Estimates
Having worked in small to largest IT services company which take up contract work, I have provided estimations for project work. The estimations by the tech team is usually provided to the clients @ 2x - 5x times the original effort. So I exactly know where these outsourcing companies jack up the estimates and I can help you to identify and cut down the extra fat in estimates, without affecting effforts required for tech team and quality.
Cost Optimization by Technology
In most cases, these IT companies provide you with solutions, that they know, that they already have coded, or biased by their opinions. For example, suggessting a JAVA based web application with simple to moderate complexity, just because the company knows it. Its better to go with a PHP/Node JS type. You will get reliability, lower time to market and better cost. Although JAVA is time tested, it works well for larger application.
Avoiding “Change Request Scam”
Change Request(CR) is something you pay for feature/items that were not in original contract. Once you award IT contract to a IT services company, you can find them raising CR’s if there is a deviation from requirement. The outsourcing IT companies, usually bid lowest price for IT contract and they hope to make money by deliberately underwriting requirements/using confusing statements in original requirements specification, and they hold you ransom, by demanding you pay for CRs. This is a big problem when executing an IT project in fixed bid model. The responsible IT manager/ Product Owner/User who awards the contract, is usually not strong with their communication skills and such problems happen much often.
My expertise can help you identify those weak spots, and ensure that requirements are taken up properly, and is a part of contract and avoid the CR scam.
2. Optimize your requirements for a better product
Improve your requirements and so your product - The agile way
In 2020, now most of the companies do follow, the agile way of executing a IT project. It is required that you have to break down the requirements as functional independent modules, called User Stories . The collection of user stories, to be executed, are called Backlog. I would suggest the clients actually prepare the user stories and order them according to the priority. If required, I offer to help in creating requirements as user stories and backlogs. This would require a couple of sessions of interactions between us over Skype. Its imporant that it has to be done from the client side, so that they remain in total control of requirements and avoids the question of Change Requests.
Get more ‘Bang for Bucks’ for your money
I can help you in priortizing user stories, that can be suggested take it up front. Prioritizing modules with value benefit and low time executions can be taken up front providing most bang for your bucks. There is a niche skill required to identify such user stories, which doesn’t have any dependency technically with other modules and can be achieved independently.Psychologically its often said you get best modules of an application, during first few cycles of spring completion.
For example, if you are developing an uber like app, I would suggest you take up mapping and routing alogirthms first, cab ordering modules, payments processing and then user signup and login. Although signup and login, might be of very low duration, they don’t provide much value early on.
3. Picking best tools for building your product
Choose Right Technical Stack
Surgeon’s knife (Scalpel) would be small,thin and super sharp, customized to delicately open a skin, while chef’s knife will be bigger and designed for chopping. Likewise you need to pick the right technical stack for your project.
When you want to built a mobile app, next thing is you have to select technology. When youd do a google searach, you would get various options like Native, Ionic, React Native, Flutter, Kotlin multi platform with Compose UI etc. If you try to research and narrow one technology, you will end up confused on technology selection. These are times when you need a expereinced professional, like us, to recommend technology. For example if you select a cross/hybrid platform for a hardware intensive app, you would end up with having 3 teams, front-end developers, iOS and Android developers and app development and maintenance would be a nightmare. So in this case you need to build a native mobile app.
4. Auditing product architecture and progress
Ensure the Product is built according to the blueprint
We can do auditing of your entire application architecture and progress, and we can provide you accurate audit and compliance report of application progress. We would also give you recommendations to improve application architecture.
5. Managing your development team
Your Product, Our Responsibilities
Most of the clients, want to start and complete an application as soon as possible. They would also like to have the application with minimal interaction with the development team. We usually will take up the responsibility of managing your offshore team and provide you with weekly updates. This will free up much time for you, that you can start thinking about building new awesome stuffs.
6. Automation for your product
More quality with Automation
We could setup automation for your application, which would eliminate manual labour at various levels, bringing down possibilities of manual error and cutting down costs in the long run. A good example is to setup devops for your application like writing automated test cases and build generation.
Development teams who require consulting/queries/help at technology level, click the Consulting section.
Contact for getting more details on our services and for references.