Camsoft Business Consulting Services.

At Camsoft we know that now – more than ever – tech development needs to be agile and immediately responsive to the changing nature of the marketplace. And very responsive to the individual customer. There is always the pressure to get code written and to get new systems into the field but you are often dealing with very fast changing business situations. More haste, however, can off mean less speed.

We take the view that if you keep the customer (or end user) close and onside during the discovery and development process you can still make rapid progress whilst delivering quality solutions. Our approach is governed by the following customer-driven methodology based on ensuring that you the customer (and end user of the tech) are the drivers of the core functionality being developed:

1. CUSTOMER DISCOVERY

   First understand the environment into which new tech is being introduced - key questions to ask.

   • What’s the business problem you are trying to solve?
   • What validation do you have that the problem exists and, if so, is it sufficiently painful / costly for the customer that they will part with cash to invest in your solution?
   • Have you spoken to potential customers and gotten their views on the problem?
   • What’s the core business model? – How does the tech solution pay for itself?

   Create a Customer Discovery Plan and execute. We help provide a full Customer Discovery offering including analysis of the problem being addressed and designing survey instruments to collect the data from end users and key stakeholders. We can create the tools for you to manage this process, or we can handle survey design and deployment remotely.

2. BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS

   If required by the project, or if we feel it can add value for you, we use the classic form of the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder 2012) to quickly understand the overall customer value proposition, the target market segments, and the proposed revenue model for the product or tech solution.

3. BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYSIS

   Understanding the end-to-end business process is key to understanding how your technology will be used in the field. We encourage the accurate and meticulous scrutiny of the business problem and associated processes. Often, even simple process mapping exercises can reveal key insights into how tasks are carried out now and how the tech-enabled business process will work. If the work processes and numerous and complex then it’s a must to map our workflows and delineate the users roles.

   A required we can help research, map and document the business environment to ensure the proposed tech solutions are clearly specified to solve the key business problems being addressed.

4. PROTOTYPING & MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

   When your eyes are bigger than your stomach? Yes it’s always good to have feature rich systems - but only if

   • all the features must be included in the first build, and
   • all features have been validated as necessary and within scope for the end user

   This is rarely the case, however. Typically we advise creating early prototypes (in wireframe or on paper) to get feedback from users. These are fast and easy to change (or in the lingo to iterate). If these yield positive feedback from the user community, a minimum viable product (MVP) can be the first tech build and is a low cost solution to conduct early tests.

   Agile discovery and development processes mean we build flexibility into the business analysis and tech development phases of IT projects and so prevent wasteful development being discarded for want of basic testing.

5. REQUIREMENTS PLANNING

   TBC

6. PROGRAMME & PROJECT MANAGEMENT

   TBC