Investing in custom built software can be a daunting prospect. How to accurately articulate the functionality? How much will it cost? How long will it take? Will it work?

The Standish Group CHAOS Reports estimate that approximately 30% of software projects are complete failures, 50 - 60% are challenged (delivered late, over budget or missing key features) and only 10 - 20% are considered successful.

That represents a lot of expensive mistakes and lost opportunity. Why does this happen?

Here are the main reasons; poor requirements gathering, limited stakeholder involvement, scope creep, unrealistic timelines or budgets, bad technical architecture decisions, weak project management.

But it doesn't need to be this way.

We've created a simple 8 stage guide to custom software development. This includes; Discovery, Definition, Budget, Design, Build, Test, Deploy, Support.

If you and your vendor ensure all these stages are covered in detail, with fully scoped plans, timings and costs you'll be well on your way to having a solution that works exactly as you want it to.

Our one page explainer has more info. Click here to download it or find it in the resources section of our media page. And if you'd like to discuss further we'd be happy to help.