How to spot a good development partner

Modern businesses need more than just a development team. They need a transformation partner that can help them deliver innovation, disrupt their industry, upskill their existing team, and respond rapidly to emerging situations and opportunities, whether Covid or customer demand.

This takes a completely different approach. A bespoke and flexible one that delivers results up front and isn’t averse to sharing knowledge. An approach that sets them apart from traditional or standard models.

Early warning signs your current model is not working

You’re not delivering at pace - consultancy costs are going up but velocity is not. Approach and execution are inefficient or results are hard to predict or quantify. You are not getting products to market.

The morale in your team is hitting rock bottom - ideas are not being heard, knowledge transfer and team upskilling is deprioritised. Good people are leaving and recruitment is more and more difficult.

Decisions are slow or not being made - more time is spent discussing problems than acting on them, direction feels unclear. The organisation is struggling to identify the most important thing to focus on next.

What a good development partner looks like

1. Sharing knowledge

At Worth, we take a different approach. We believe in enabling our clients and ensuring they are better positioned when we leave. So, rather than a consultant who withholds knowledge transfer to ensure future commissions, or a body shop that just builds stuff and hands it back to you to manage and operate, our approach is more considerate. We actively share our knowledge.

2. Embedding experts

It’s also about embedding expert teams that work alongside you, helping you gain knowledge, establish better ways of working, and the confidence and ability to self-manage a project when we go. Instead of giving you a black-box solution we’d rather explain how things work and openly share expertise so you can succeed in the future.

3. Multiskilled and collaborative

We also believe that a good development partner should offer clients a blend of expertise, and that’s our approach. We have multidisciplinary teams that are highly collaborative and self-organising. They incorporate skilled and experienced software engineers, testers, user experience designers and project experts. People who take time to understand the needs of your business, end users and tech team.

In addition, our people are specialists, not generalists. And we consider proven application development experience to be essential, and have the customer stories and references to back it up.

4. Continuous development

Ours is a powerful DevOps culture based on continuous development success through continuous integration, delivery and deployment. We believe in having a big vision but starting small. Testing, automating and iterating along the way. Reducing technical debt. Weeding out failure quickly. Improving constantly. And rapidly scaling up what works to foster innovation and success. But we also know that Agile isn’t everything. While it’s great for things like collaborative development, self-organising and cross-functional teams, your software delivery might call for a different approach, and we’re open to exploring conventional development methods if required.

So, to conclude, while there are many firms out there that can handle your technical challenges, we advise choosing a partner that will also upskill your existing team and leave behind a legacy of change.