Painful as it is, sometimes it's just best to say no. This week, I visited a client running an Equinox application they'd developed themselves and had worked pretty well for many years supporting the needs of their Estate Agency Business. They'd decided that it was time to investigate upgrading to a newer version to solve some reliability and stability issues, and also to add functionality to support a new business direction.
Bespoke development isn't right for every business. If there's an application out there that fulfills the needs of the business - go buy it. A bespoke system just doesn't represent best value in this example. A few minor tweaks and changes to an existing application to improve stability, sure. But fundamentally, the Estate Agency game has a common set of processes and of business requirements that are provided for by a plethora of fixed applications one can purchase off-the-shelf.
A wasted trip? Not totally. The meeting took an hour, during which we were able to qualify that we could have wasted a whole lot more time writing a specification and proposal for a project that was never going to be more cost effective than buying an off-the-shelf application. So why isn't bespoke right in this example?
- Is the business unique? Perhaps if they'd been trying to re-invent the Estate Agency market with some radically different techniques and pricing models it might have qualified. But their processes were the same as those of thousands of other small Estate Agencies, and their unique selling points were those of reputation, availability, experience etc rather than the way in which they worked.
- Would a bespoke system add any advantage over the businesses competitors? Nope. This business will differentiate itself through marketing, pricing and customer service, not through unique processes.
- Is modifying or creating an application more cost effective than buying one? Certainly not, in this example.
Plus, the 35 pounds train fare was worth the five hours alone with a laptop to catch up on other work - so in fact, not a wasted trip at all!
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