When your software fails to align with your business objectives, it quickly becomes a burden on your team. There’s a good chance you’ve already experienced this, which is why you’re here now. Business software needs to enable -- empower -- your whole team to help your business achieve its objectives and create efficient and effective business performance. How do you align your business objectives and your custom software?
First of all, is there a difference between goals and objectives? Yes. Objectives are the steps your business needs to take to achieve your business goals. In order to identify your business goals, begin with your company’s mission statement. That will help you begin with the end in mind -- your big picture goal. From there, identify goals that will support that big picture goal. Now, for each goal, identify the objectives that you will need to achieve in order to hit the goal.
Once you have a well-defined list of goals and objectives, you can start your software development plan and align that plan to your goals and objectives.
How often do we experience software that slows down processes, creates manual busywork, or simply creates frustration in the organization rather than greasing the skids of strong business performance? When software doesn’t align with your business goals, it starts to drift away from being a vital part of your operation into an obstacle to success. When software aligns with your goals, the whole team (internal and external users) will use the software and champion updates and upgrades that ensure it contributes to achieving those business goals. A synergy develops between business strategy and your software plan.
Starting with specific goals and objectives for the business, your software development team will take these steps to ensure that your new custom software aligns with those goals.
Quantify Business Goals: By now, you have already done this. But it’s a pivotal first step, so here it is. These are the focal points of this whole process.
Discovery: Your software developer will do a deep dive discovery to identify software requirements that match up with your goals and objectives. The discovery will include input from all involved (teams, users, customers, vendors, etc.) as well as the Executive Team that will be managing the organization’s march toward achieving these goals.
Define Success: Connect your software requirements, including functionality and reports, to your business goals. Then identify key metrics that will define the success of your software. These metrics include both business performance and user behavior.
Identify Scope: Every project needs a well-defined scope of work to set expectations upfront. The scope needs to explicitly connect with the business goals and objectives defined above.
Detailed Proposal: This is the plan to develop your software. It will include timeline, budget, and project management details.
The key to a successful software development project is communication. From discussing those business goals and objectives to a thorough discovery to implementation, your software team needs to keep you updated, in the loop, and get feedback at each stage.
Feel free to contact us to review your project needs. Aligning business objectives and goals with custom business software is what we do, it’s what we’ve done with our customers from day one.
Let’s review your project and get you a proposal.