Price and time given above is per 10 articles.
I won't be able to provide and example of exactly an article here as most of the work I do is white labelled. Still I can include a blog post that I wrote long time back to give you an example of my writing.
I have been lately discussing a lot of business aspects with one of my friends, and we discussed what not. He suggested me to share my ideas with others through blog. I have been ignoring creating a blog, but today I just felt like writing it.
I recently answered a question on LinkedIn which was about fair prices of software products/services. In that thread people have discussed a lot of factors that affect the price of a software service or product. The basic argument being that whether there is a fair price of the service or product or should the price be calculated in terms of value it creates for the business.
I strongly feel that instead of saying fair prices, we should think of fair solutions. Proposing a huge CRM for a provision store or proposing a computer vision application for a small manufacturer would be of no use. Instead we should try to think of fair solutions which will really add value to the business and weigh close to budget (either directly or indirectly). Something like a Point of Sale solution for a provision store, which is more of a generic product than a personalized system, so that it can be distributed to many provision stores and the “fair price” can be recovered.
However, very few went back in the chain and thought of a right solution at first place. This era of business is suffering from what I call as “undirected introspection”. In most of the business processes, people in operations either do not have the liberty to be cognized or do not consider themselves to be honored enough for the same. People who actually have the honor and liberty to think are busy thinking about bigger problems like profit, loss, currency, NAV, financial statements and all. No one actually realizes that these big problems are rooted down in the smaller problems, and we just keep running around them.
I just went back to a few cases for which I did requirements analysis. In most of the cases the end client hears a buzzword and wants that to be done because some CEO/CTO/Director has told him that it will work for his business and create value. For instance, we dealt with a two people company asking for MS CRM implementation, when we interrogated them, we realized that what they needed was just a contacts and lead management solution, which we could build for 10% of the price that we would have quoted for the solution demanded, and which would be quite out of their budget.
This is where business analysis and requirements engineering plays a critical role. I believe that IT solutions should be need driven than budget driven. I have seen many companies asking for IT solutions for following reasons:
• IT is in trend
• IT enhances goodwill in the market
• IT is talk of the town today and why don’t we have it
• My friend said IT will help control a lot of costs
• IT ensures faster operations
• We are left with “X” amount of money after all financial planning so thought of adding value to our business through IT…. Etc.
None of the case demonstrates real need of an IT solution. They actually might have needed an IT solution, but their emphasis was not on the need but desire. This eventually leads to an unwanted solution, and hence to problems like:
•Unfair pricing
•Unclear scope
•Abstract requirements
•Unclear objective
•And finally an overhead to maintain the unwanted solution
Also, some companies ignore the roles of business/requirements analysts, QA etc., which of course helps them to reduce prices of the products/services, but also reduces the “need” factor from services and products. IT is just not about developing solutions that clients want, but also analyzing their need and advising solutions that they actually need than their wants. This fair practice however may reduce current revenues of the IT Company due to not forcing the client to go for costly solutions, but in long term will add value to the overall IT industry and avoid unnecessary wastefulness in the industry. This fair practice will bring out more trust on IT companies, and will ensure repeat business for all.
Since long we have been taking business development wrongly as skill to force sales. Business Development is actually about identifying the need for a fair solution that will develop a business. If the motive of IT companies is aligned with the motive of client businesses, fair solutions will be easily visible and hence a fair price too.