16 - Application Development for Small Businesses Part II

Sun Tzu 4 Small Business | Strategy and Tactics, Technology and Leadership, Management and Marketing for Small Business Owners

Creating bespoke software for your small business has never been easier or cheaper than it is today and it can make a fundamental difference to the productivity and profitability of your business.

We look at Google Analytics. Do you know how to use Google Analytics? It tells you some key metrics for your website.

Most small business websites get around 500 to 1,000 visits a month. Where are they coming from? What are they looking for? Is the site mobile optimised? What content do they look at?

For App Dev, we use a cut down version of agile development. We look to build a series of minimum viable products. This is something that you can get in front of customers.

We look at inputs, outputs and processes.

Inputs. How does information get in?

Outputs. How is information displayed in the app? What are the reports?

Processes. What are the business processes in the application.

We like to think about these for long enough so that people really understand the inputs/outputs and processes for an app. We will often do this on butcher's paper, or in excel. These are easy to do and through away as you realise that you have made a mistake.

The more time that you spend with this before coding, the cheaper the application will be to make and the quicker it will be to create.

Applications can be great at bringing together silos of data and cutting down on double and triple handling of data. I hate human interaction with data because it can introduce human errors into the system. Apps can make these processes in your business faster and more accurate.

We talk about getting the data that you have in your business and creating data Komodos.

We discuss the agile manifesto and how it works with application development and the minimum viable product.

The application development process is often a journey and building smaller iterations enables an organisation to learn during the process and this makes a better final product.