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02 · Custom software

Software built around how the business already works.

  • Custom software is what you build when the work itself is the problem: the quote that takes three days, the process only one person can complete, the spreadsheet that has quietly become load bearing. It is also the category with the most ways to waste money, which is why none of it starts before a diagnosis.
The constraint

The expensive problems are the ones nobody wrote down.

Most businesses do not have a software problem. They have a process that grew, one person who understands it, and a spreadsheet holding the middle together. Software is worth building when that shape is costing real money, and worth avoiding when it is not. The evidence on which projects go wrong is unusually clear, and it does not say what most people assume.

The average is not the risk

Across 1,471 IT projects the average cost overrun was 27%. But one in six overran by an average of 200%, with schedules running almost 70% over. Flyvbjerg and Budzier, Harvard Business Review, 2011. The average is survivable. The tail is not.

Off-the-shelf is not the safe option

Across 1,355 public-sector IT projects, 18% overran cost by more than 25%. Projects built on off-the-shelf software did worse, at 24%. Budzier and Flyvbjerg, 2012. Buying standard software is riskier than the average project, not safer.

The spreadsheet is load bearing

Seven field audits covering 367 spreadsheets found errors in 24% overall, but the audits using the strongest methods found errors in at least 86%. Panko, 2008. The gap is explained entirely by how hard anyone looked.

Sample

Where the three days actually go.

Before anything gets built we draw how work moves through the business: who touches an enquiry, what they do to it, and where it waits. The waiting is usually the cost, and it is usually not where people expect.

Flow diagram of a quote moving through a business in six stages. Stage three waits for one engineer and stage four is priced in a spreadsheet, both marked in red as the points where the process stalls.
Vertical version of the quote flow diagram: enquiry, sales check, waiting for one engineer, pricing in a spreadsheet, re-typing, and a quote sent three days later.
Fit

When custom software is the answer, and when it is not.

Software is the most expensive thing on this site and the easiest to buy for the wrong reason. Here is the honest split.

Worth doing when

  • One person is the only one who can complete a step, and everyone knows who.
  • The same information gets typed into three systems by hand.
  • A spreadsheet decides prices and nobody has ever audited it.
  • You have outgrown an off-the-shelf tool in a specific, nameable way.

Worth postponing when

  • Nobody has written down how the process actually works today.
  • The real problem is that two people disagree about who owns a step.
  • An off-the-shelf tool would do it and nobody has tried one.
  • The budget assumes the average project rather than the tail.
Scope

What actually moves the number.

Four things move the cost of a build, and writing code is only one of them.

Building software forces every unwritten rule into the open, and that is where the time goes. If one person decides, this is fast. If sales, operations and finance each hold a different version of the process in their head, the expensive part of the project is the conversation, not the code.
A tool that stands alone costs a fraction of one that reads from an accounting system, writes to a CRM and stays in step with both. Every integration is a dependency you now own, and every one of them changes without asking you.
Migrating years of records entered inconsistently is frequently the largest single line in a build. On the same 1,355-project sample, data management was the worst category of all: 41% overran cost by more than a quarter.
Every extra year of project duration adds about 4.2 percentage points of cost risk, on that same sample. Shorter phases with something usable at the end of each is not a preference. It is risk management.
Questions

What people ask before they commit.

The ones that come up most, answered plainly.

Often, and we will say so. It is also not automatically cheaper: on 1,355 public-sector projects, builds based on off-the-shelf software overran cost more often than the average. The question is not custom versus standard. It is whether the thing you are buying matches the process you actually run.
You own the code, the hosting and the accounts from the start rather than at the end. Anything built here can be picked up by another developer, and the handover assumes that will happen one day.
We do not price it before the diagnostic. The diagnostic produces the scope, the sequence and a rough effort per piece, written so you can take it to another firm and get a comparable answer back.
That is the default. Shorter phases with something usable at the end of each, because duration is itself a risk factor and a long project with a single delivery date is the shape that goes wrong.
No. Running both in parallel until the new one has earned the switch is normal, and it is usually the cheapest insurance available.
Start here
  • A written answer, not a sales proposal
  • What is wrong, and what to fix first
  • Yours whether or not you build with us

Start with a diagnostic.

Tell us what you're dealing with. You get a written answer: what is wrong, what to fix first, and in what order.

Start with a diagnostic
(+65) 8836 4587

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