When it comes to web development, many organizations go about it with a nascent sense of what their applications should look like or do. Some will delve into the technical foundation of the application as well. Unfortunately, it is rare to find organizations that develop a complete sense of requirements – both functional and technical – and that also focus on user experience, upgrades, patches, bug fixes, and even the eventual sunset of the applications and development of something new.

Many application development projects begin with good intentions and generous investments of cash. Sadly, those projects often end with just the good intentions after all the cash has been spent and the application isn’t exactly what was envisioned.

Successful application development initiatives require key decisions to be made well ahead of the decision to begin coding. Even when vendors are consulted, peers in other companies are contacted, and word-of-mouth or sheer Wow factor, the new solution isn’t always exactly what was wanted.

The correct way to ensure that the development of an application leads to a useful, valuable tool is to follow a simple order: People, then process, then tools. If you don’t know the skills of the people who will be using the application and how they approach their work it makes it very difficult to develop an application that is successfully adopted. Simply put, if you don’t know what processes exist today then there’s a lesser likelihood that any solution you develop will contain the right features, or that all of those features will ever get implemented.

Developing new tools should follow a process improvement effort, rather than attempting to create one. After all, without the process improvements in place, all that a new tool can do is to make a bad process go very, very fast.

Take a step back and understand your current state when developing your requirements. Rather than giving in to the feeling that you need to “Just do something” that tends to result in “Doing just anything,” why not work with us to understand your organization’s needs? DineEngine can work with you to understand your business and develop applications that are not only technologically sound, but that also fit your organization in ways you may not have even considered.

Contact us to begin the discussion around how your applications should be developed, and exactly what will fit your organization perfectly.