Introduction

Custom software is meant to be tailored to your needs to address specific business challenges, unlock growth and increase efficiency. However, more often than not, this is done without the right business context - and that is what our CAPstone approach is all about. 

Most custom software development vendors expect a fully specified brief or feature list - that must be both comprehensive and extremely specific - whereas businesses are really trying to solve specific problems - this often results in getting you what you asked for, but not what you really need. Don’t get us wrong, this rent-a-coder approach is just what you sometimes need, and our AUGMENT offering does just that, but the CAPstone is when you have a problem you need to solve, but not necessarily the perfect solution just yet.

The - got what you asked for, but not what you need - is often the result of a combination of 3 factors:

1. Limited bandwidth on the product owner/IT side: Extracting requirements from business users is not easy - competing priorities, commercial pressures and limited resourcing force compromises.
2. Development teams do not understand the business: Vendors do not have the capability and processes to understand their client’s businesses - nor do they really try to. What really is the objective of building feature X in this particular way - that is rarely discussed - losing out on opportunities to leverage experience and analytical ability to approach in a way that may address the business challenge more effectively.
3. Missing Agility, Risk is not front loaded: The opportunity to course correct doesn’t really exist - until too much effort, time and money has been spent - resulting in further compromises and further technical debt. Even when typical Agile approaches are used, they are often focused on iterative feature addition with fully functional software - which costs time and money. There are always ambitions of the next version, however most resources are often dedicated to getting what is already built to work right for various use cases.

 
To address these challenges, we created the CAPstone - a unique, time-tested approach to creatively solving business challenges through custom software:

1. Context: Know - The people. The processes. The business model. The goals. Context is what makes our solutions relevant and extremely effective at delivering results. Through a series of initial workshops, we speak directly with your major stakeholders to determine what the pain points are, what areas of opportunities exist and the environment in which the software will be used. In 95% of our projects, getting deeper context has resulted in uncovering previously unaddressed pain points and opportunities
2. Analysis: Using the deep organisational context we now have, our business analysts co-create a model with your major stakeholders that addresses the pain points and needs for all stakeholders and use cases. This is normally done in collaboration with technical and designers to unlock any technical/design opportunities and to ensure the solution is practical.
3. Prototype: The analysis phase ensures that we’ve got a potential solution and working model, but instead of jumping to build the software immediately, we build an intractable prototype that can be tested with real users, whether they be internal ones or customers. This allows us to ensure they are not only happy with the model but also are happy with the overall user experience.

With a well-defined, road tested solution, we begin the agile development process, by prioritising the most important/urgent features to consistently deliver working software throughout the project lifecycle. 

The CAPstone approach has helped us build solutions for a wide variety of industries and problems - whether that be creating a unique personalised shopping experience for a fashion retailer, solving staffing challenges for a professional service provider or redefining an entire health/wellbeing platform. 

We’d love to put the CAPstone approach to work for your company, schedule a discovery call to see how we can help you get more out of your custom software development initiatives.