At Fluent, we specialize in internal business applications that help you drive your operations. Custom enterprise applications can:
- Inform daily business decisions
- Coordinate teams
- Establish greater alignment across divisions
- Automate complex analysis
- Reduce operational costs on labor-intensive work
- Unlock hidden revenue streams by synthesizing business intelligence data
Even though these benefits are well understood, many organizations, even large corporations, struggle with designing an application that would implement the operational innovation that they can see they need. This is usually because successful businesses are run by leaders in their industry, but they often have little experience in software and systems design.
Staying up to date with the cutting edge of User Experience Design, software development frameworks, cloud infrastructure architecture, Agile Development principles, and effective product management processes, can be a daunting task even for the most talented software consultancies. Understandably, staying at the forefront of all these fields is rarely within the core competency of large organizations, even with dedicated R&D and IT departments. It often makes sense to outsource development where an organization might feel lacking in intellectual capital. However, as many a project manager has discovered, outsourcing software development can bring its own challenges.
Sometimes the challenges that arise from outsourcing software development are the result of poor technical execution. Just as often, they are the product of cultural or communication issues. When a technical team is brought into execute a business’ vision, it’s imperative that conceptual alignment is established across the business and technical teams. Technical teams sometimes fail to internalize of the business domain. Frequently, developers will fail to make a compelling case for extra refactoring, redesigns, or architectural work. Such misalignments lead to wasted project money, and produce poorer performing software products, while sewing distrust and dysfunction across teams.
There’s a way to get a better product, with broader team alignment and less budgetary waste. Our strategy is to first and foremost understand the business domain and operational goals before we invest any work in technical solutioning. At Fluent, we see ourselves as partners with our clients, and we work to make collaboration with us as natural as working within your business.
Fluent uses effective, proven techniques for exploring our client’s dynamic understanding of their business before we write a line of code. And we establish a resilient, iterative process for re-evaluating project and client needs as we move forward, assuring that any misalignment is quickly addressed. This also helps us establish deeper collaboration with end-users and product owners, steering us around project obstacles as they arise.