It’s Definitely Time to Talk with a Top Software Consultant
Is a Software Consultant helping your company keep up with digital changes? Business processes evolve, and your management team has been through many transformations over the years in order to connect with other firms’ software B2B-style. If you’re a B2C software firm, you’re also in touch with the public, usually through marketing and sales. As relationship technologies become essential, a software consultant can help you adapt.
It’s More Than a New Technology or New Software
Now, the “digital transformation” is changing your company’s culture to one that does more than relate to other businesses and consumers. Digital technology and software provide real-time integration between your processes and your customers’ needs and ideas. Your software consultant is your guide.
Software Development Consulting: Your Connection
A software consultant bridges technology and creative solutions, offering ideas about how to create a synergy between your business objectives and apps, web services, social media conversations, and leading-edge tech features. These engagement tools will inspire your customers and make your products and services part of a bigger digital message. Software consultants provide access to the digital transition that involves the change from B2B, B2C, and other bidirectional business relationships to an integrated engagement. The company’s role and the customer’s combine and influence each other for mutual benefit.
Your software consultant is a resource for these important questions:
Are our internal and customer-facing software applications and web resources effective?
How do we reach out to mobile customers and influencers?
How do we get our software strategy implemented? Who’s going to produce, test, and update it?
How does cloud computing factor into our software operations and outreach?
What do we need to do to bring our database and software resources to real-time availability?
How do we manage our increased IT software resources? Internal personnel, contracted, on-call?
How does blockchain software fit into our strategy?
What does our UI/UX presence look like? How does it support our message and value proposition?
Is the Internet of Things (IoT) part of our software strategy? How is that going to happen?
What can we learn and gain from all this new software data flow? Can we leverage Big Data software for insights?
Survival Pressure from Technology Revolutions
Not that long ago, companies realized that they needed a website and software to survive. Now, people can’t even find businesses without some web presence. People expect companies to reach out and provide interactive software experiences, ironically very similar to the old days of shopkeeping when no one was a stranger in town. This also goes for B2B connections, where a highly personal purchasing-sales connection forms the foundation of many thriving businesses. People shop where they feel good, and where they feel confident they can get what they want and need.
Your Guide in New Territory
Picturing your C-suite team on safari or exploring the Amazon jungle, consultant guiding the way, isn’t a bad way to look at it. There’s a lot to understand, and a lot of the new technology that’s driving business is unfamiliar. The reason is, it’s not just a website here and an app there, which is how many companies approach it. The software consultant is your guide to understanding the big picture. They’ll answer your questions, explain how the pieces are now integrated and why that’s essential, and help you architect a solution that will scale. That is, as your company hits the ground running with an integrated digital message, you’ll be able to handle the crowds.
Experience with Growing Pains Is Especially Valuable
Most companies are going to experience some software growing pains as every organization has some “siloing” that isolates business units. When your management team builds a new vision in software to support your operations, marketing, and sales teams, it will be important to reach out and address the concerns of groups newly connecting with dynamic information flow. Your software consultant can pass along information on how other companies have faced positive but disruptive growth and give you guidance towards organizational help. After all, the software can’t be a success if it doesn’t represent the people of the company.
A Software Consultant Is a Translation Job
A software consultant who brings excellence to the table is one who has seen the transformation in different types of companies, bringing detailed stories of success and harrowing tales of how failure was averted.
Software Consulting is an Integration Job
When your company relies on real-time, dynamic connections between your operations and your customers, your software had better be working in harmony. By this point, many companies have gone through the process and there are plenty of excellent software solutions, including turnkey packages from big-name software companies. Your software consultant is your guide here too.
Your Software Consultant Provides High-Tech Solutions for Your Customers
By offering new visions, ideas, and practical advice, from a single starting point to a total makeover, your consultant helps you provide your products and services to businesses and consumers in the way that they’re coming to expect. For companies that personalize their strategy and persist, the rewards can be significant as these doors are open 24/7 and as wide as you want them.
Sonatafy Technology helps software teams make the right moves to gain a competitive edge. We bring an integrated set of capabilities to the software development lifecycle spanning all technology stacks. We tailor of software solutions to meet the needs of all types of software teams looking to enhance their current offerings and enterprise software capabilities.
Q&A
What does a software consultant do?
Software consults are typically brought in as consultants (i.e. not employee) to provide advice on how software applications should be implemented utilizing current industry approaches.
A software consultant’s role is to be a trusted advisor helping companies effectively manage their enterprise software and teams. They assist business leaders to design, optimize, architect, and implement software and processes. Software consultants don’t always write software code but instead advise on technology and software solutions between programming languages, cloud technologies, and integrating company systems. A good software consultant will be an expert that will provide your team with opinions on how to effectively communicate with your software engineers. In some instances, software engineers are highly talented professionals that are experts in their domain and technology stack but are not always great at communication with non-technical resources. Software consultants can often bridge this gap and unlock greater collaboration and effectiveness of the technical software and non-technical software stakeholders. They typically have deep knowledge of software and workflows that surround the software development lifecycle.
A good software consultant helps introduce new ways of thinking that guide teams to figure out solutions for themselves and brings a new point of view to the stakeholders to understand all of the team members’ viewpoints, challenges, and obstacles. Collaboration is key to effective software development teams and software consultants can help unlock this value.
Effective software consultants typically have five to eight years (or more) of experience in software development and in a software consulting environment. A degree in computer science is often desirable as it provides the software consultant the knowledge and operation of a wide variety of coding languages and scripts such as Python, JavaScript, Java, C#/C/C++, and PHP to name a few. Also, they should be able to multitask effectively, able to work independently, and have good business judgment.
Typical Software Consultant Tasks
Design software systems customized for specific tasks or industries.
Analyze a company’s software system and determine how to use software to make processes more efficient.
Provide technical software support and troubleshooting services for clients.
What jobs are available for top software consultants? What type of Resume do I need and how much do software consultants make?
According to numerous software job posting websites an entry-level software consultant can average a salary of $85,000 per year. As the software consultant gets more experience they have the opportunity to increase their earnings to over $147,000. Indeed.com recently published a report stating that 76% of software consultants in the United States believe their salaries are enough to handle the cost of living in their area.
Further, experienced individuals often have deep domain expertise in various industries such as healthcare/life sciences, fintech, e-commerce, or other industries. Having the desired industry expertise along with the location of the software consultant often are a large factor in their earnings and compensation.
Do software consultants write code?
Some software consultants start off as programmers and write code. But not all of them. The key to becoming a software consultant is to dive into advice about the software product as a whole, not just the programming code. Good software consultants are able to help their clients redefine challenges and constraints avoiding bigger problems and wasted resource efforts.
What is the difference between a software engineer and consultant?
A software engineer’s job is to focus on building software. Their role may include designing, developing and installing software solutions for an organization’s operations. Software engineers typically have 3 to 5+ years of programming experience and have knowledge of multiple programming languages.
A software consultant is a technology professional that gives advice on strategy, design and implementation of software solutions that solve various business challenges. Software consultants are often brought into an organization to audit their software and technology plans and provide a third-party opinion on potential areas of improvement and advise on pointing out key areas they organization may not be considering.
To summarize, often software consultants are responsible for assisting or creating the technology roadmap and software engineers are typically the hands-on programmers that make the roadmap happen.
How do software consultants work?
Software consultants focus on understanding client requirements and their business objectives. They provide strategic advice on using software and technology to achieve desired outcomes. Software consultants also manage various IT engagements by collaborating with in house technical staff and software teams.
How do I become a software consultant?
To be a software consultant you need to have the right mix of technology and business skills. The majority of software consultants have a bachelor’s degree and / or a master’s degree in computer science and business.
To become a software consultant, you need to shift your mindset from programming code to creating roadmaps for organizations. Many software consultants start off by practicing their skills on smaller projects to gain experience. To differentiate yourself as a software consultant, many have developed key areas of expertise based on technology and industry. For example, a strong specialty can be as an expert in AWS cloud technologies in the automotive industry or a Mobile technology expert in the retail industry.
A software consultant’s career path typically takes them through multiple roles, including Project Manager, Product Manager, Director of Software Development and Chief Technology officer.
What makes a good software consultant?
Business and technical expertise and understands the software development lifecycle.
Focuses on continuous improvement as opposed to just following standards.
Standards should help the critical thinking process but it they should not replace it. Standards can be improved and evolve.
Introduces new ways to think and improves communication between business and technical leaders.
Understand the key pillars of teamwork which include: Trust and Vulnerability, Health Conflict, Commitment to Decisions, Accountability and Attention to Results.
Have a high Emotional Intelligence (EQ) which is the ability to understand, use and manager your emotions in a positive way to communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.
What are the benefits of hiring a software consultant?
Help an organization see the big picture (i.e. the organizations real goals) and prioritize your business needs based on a roadmap to realize your key goals.
Introduce new technology that can improve the way you work and provide cost efficiencies
Improve your business operations with their expertise in business processes, organizational change, Information Technology and risk management.
Speed up implementation times when you switch software or technology platforms or add functionality that is time consuming.
