Our approach as an IT consulting firm: use well- developed out-of-the-box functionality wherever possible and skillfully craft the rest

Our IT consulting company offers a unique blend of IT consultancy services and low-code enterprise app development. As IT consultants and Enterprise Architecture experts, we deem that it is often more expedient to use out-of-the-box functionality and well-crafted customization to address enterprise app development needs more optimally. Luckily, our IT consulting firm has both an abundance of experience and a brand-name, low-code enterprise solution from our parent company Backendless Corp. to enable this approach. This winning combination frequently allows us to offer better IT consultancy services and app development options than those many other enterprise software companies can offer. As a leading information technology provider, Backendless Corp. provides us with a core technology that allows us to successfully implement virtually any kind of enterprise software development project. Our in-depth and comprehensive IT Consulting and Delivery process is pillared upon our company’s following defining goals:

• Provide an ALL-IN-ONE, elaborate IT consulting and technology solution that allows you to create a full-value enterprise software application.
• Render enterprise app development is a great deal easier, less effort-intensive, and more affordable.
• Knowledgeably address any client requirement by customizing an out-of-the-box technology product, developed by our parent company Backendless Corp.
• Enable you to use out-of-the-box functionality and best practices for enterprise app development purposes wherever possible to cut costs and speed up the development process.
• Enable endless scalability of your enterprise app from the very outset by delivering it in the out-of-the-box functionality we provide.
• Make the scalability of your enterprise software FREE OF CHARGE for you once and for all.
• Give mid-sized businesses and startups the technology leverage to compete with larger-sized peers.
• Give startups a more flexible MVP development process to take off sooner and spend less.
• Implement enterprise-wide change without disruptions to your regular operation and with minimum involvement on the part of your Executives and IT experts.
• Become a leading IT consultancy company among those top consulting companies in the IT sector, that focus on the expeditious delivery of information technology solutions.

Coupled with the technology edge we have due to our close ties with our parent company Backendless Inc., our IT Consulting and Delivery process allows us to successfully achieve all these goals time and again while implementing major enterprise-grade IT projects. We use the same IT Consulting and Delivery process to work with major enterprise clients, midmarket clients, and startups with enterprise software needs.

Our IT Consulting & Delivery Process: agility and solidity gainfully combined

We are an IT consulting company, whose core business is implementing complex enterprise app development projects. Consequently, we use the full spectrum of advanced IT Consulting and Data Modelling techniques to identify your business needs and define the solution that can solve them.

Many businesses share some common traits. However, no two clients are ever completely alike. Because of this, we usually put Agility at the crux of our IT Consulting & Delivery process. Simultaneously, we still frequently make use of solid documentation artifacts wherever it makes sense to use them. In some projects, we do not kick off the development without composing a detailed technical specification. In others, we split the development process into shorter sprints. We do this with a view to getting the most mileage out of the intermediary results and better addressing any new requirements that emerge.

IT Advisory and Requirements Gathering

Our IT consultant company starts any of its customer engagements with the requirements gathering stage. In most instances, we find detailed technical specifications extremely helpful and try to use them whenever they are relevant and available. Simultaneously, we frequently settle for, or use additionally any other artifacts that describe the project’s goals and applicable business rules. In the event that you as our client do not have any written or drawn description of their system-to-be, we work closely with them to get a handle on the needs of your enterprise and your domain area. We look deeply into the problems you need to solve. We determine the project’s scope, priorities, and stakeholders. Our IT consultants take stock of any internal and external drivers of your project, identify any existing dependencies within it, and take all this information into account. The Requirements’ Gathering phase frequently becomes iterative, lasting until we have collected enough data to proceed to the Planning phase.

Planning

The Planning phase focuses on the analysis of the collected information. Our IT consultants identify the system’s functional areas and capture any interrelations between them.

To cut down on the development time, we use every opportunity we have to make our different development sprints run in parallel. In accordance with the priorities our client has set forth, we put a timeline on the intermediary deliverables. This way we create a provisional project schedule that is then adjusted to take into account the client’s various internal and external project drivers. These project drivers can include cross- organizational dependencies, investor requirements, customer presentations, and more.

Design

Whenever our IT consulting firm is tasked with implementing an IT project that includes a GUI, we absolutely prioritize this part of the project implementation effort. We then make the UI/UX design phase precede the rest of the project activities. When working with the client’s in-house or some other external UI/UX development team, we try to become involved in the UI/UX design phase as much as possible. This affords us much better visibility into the client’s business needs and processes. Our IT consultants become conversant with the client’s operational workflows, the interactions between the various user roles, and those of the client’s system with any external applications.

Our designers create sketches of each and every screen for all of the application’s user workflows. These UI/UX designs not only illustrate in minute detail the various UI elements, indicating their fonts, colors and current states, but they also show the types of data that are conveyed from screen to screen.

Furthermore, UI/UX designs help track the changes that take place across the application as a result of a user action. It becomes possible to identify with greater precision the full spectrum of the user and system interactions. We capture many existing imperfections, and refine the system requirements.

Our IT Consulting team makes a point of using all the data collected during the UI/UX design phase for Data Modelling purposes. This practice allows us to create better API endpoints, do so earlier in the development cycle, and further shorten the product’s time-to-market.

Importantly, starting a project with the UI/UX stage allows us to scatter the various project activities and make them run in parallel. It eliminates the need to postpone the backend customization effort till the completion of the project’s IT Consulting and Business Analysis stage. Therefore, under this approach, UI/UX design becomes system design. It begins to define and drives the design of the rest of the system, speeding up the project’s delivery. As a result, the delivered systems are easier to maintain and expand. They have a much better defined API service layer. The data model of these applications is more in sync with the real-world business needs the solution is intended to solve.

Our IT consultancy firm has validated the UX/UI first concept in a number of enterprise-grade IT projects. We have observed that using this concept invariably results in more functional and more bug-free implementations. The UI Builder of the Backendless no-code platform frequently helps us greatly facilitate and accelerate the UI design stage.

Development

Prior to the commencement of the Development phase, we compose a Project Plan, indicating the deliverables for each of the iterations. While working on the Project Plan, we try to make as many project activities as possible run in parallel to maximize the development speed. At this point, we decide whether it will be more beneficial to implement the client’s application codelessly by using our brand-name Backendless no-code platform, or it will be more productive to resort to code-based customization.

For code-based customization, we always use the latest technologies, specialized knowledge, and, wherever relevant, our previous industry-specific experience. Our software portfolio includes a host of projects that can be helpful in terms of industry expertise if the domain areas overlap.

Importantly, unlike most other IT consulting firms and software development providers, we give our clients a demo after each of the project iterations. We believe that is the best part of our process during the development phase. We encourage our clients to provide us with as much feedback as possible. Client feedback helps us further refine the functionality in question and render it even more in keeping with the client’s wants and needs.

The advantages that stem from our approach and IT Consulting & Delivery Process

Combined with our brand-name Backendless out-of-the-box solution, our Approach and IT Consulting and Delivery process create a wide range of advantages you can richly benefit from:

•  You cut your enterprise-grade solution’s time-to-market nearly in half.
• You pay a great deal less, since up to 50% of the functionality you get comes out of the box.
• Your consulting costs diminish due to a decreased amount of backend-related consulting and analysis.
• Your IT Department can focus on what they do and rely on our IT consultants and software developers for the rest.
• With us, your Executives may well need to devote up to 50% less time to your project’s implementation.
• You get a great deal of extra flexibility if you are developing an MVP. If you are a startup, your costs and MVP development time substantially decrease. You have a lot more room to experiment and vet different assumptions and approaches.
• You get what’s been well proven before. You avoid a boatload of hassle and mistakes you’d otherwise be sure to encounter developing the backend for your app in- house, or having it developed elsewhere.
• The amount of testing and bug-fixing on the backend decreases several-fold, and so do the related costs, hassle, and time spent.
• If you need to replace a legacy system you are heavily reliant on, our IT consultants and software engineers do so without disrupting almost any of your normal operation.

IT consulting is a field of expertise in which taking a nuanced approach can mean the world. Backendless Consulting pays utmost attention to continually improving our IT Consulting and Delivery process and better adapting it to the individual needs of each of our clients.

If you opt for employing our IT consulting services, our IT consultancy company would always be keen to go an extra mile and further adjust our IT Consulting and Delivery process to be a better fit for your information technology project.