Technology partners are a dime a dozen nowadays, and choosing the right partner can be a make-or-break decision that requires diligent consideration.
While you are most likely determined to choose your technology partner quickly, taking your time to evaluate their service offerings will help you find the partner that will make your business flourish.
We will explore what a technology partner is and highlight key factors to consider when looking for your ultimate technology partner.
What is a Technology Partner
A technology partner is a vendor/company offering tech services to fulfill your businesses’ technology requirements. These services can range from software/application development to platform integration.
What Makes a Good Technology Partner
Choosing a technology partner can be a tough decision with many factors to consider.
Below, we have compiled a shortlist of factors that will help you identify your ultimate tech partner.
Likability
It’s always sound advice to listen to your gut. If you like the initial interactions with a vendor, it’s likely for a good reason.
The fact that you like a specific vendor suggests that they were able to:
- Engage with you
- Understand your requirements
- Offer valuable insight and advice
- Instill confidence in their technical abilities
- Be trustworthy
Liking your vendor also ensures communication flows easily and frequently.
Collaboration
A great technology partner will have a range of collaboration tools at their disposal and work with you to determine the set of collaboration tools that will best accommodate both organizations.
Being able to share ideas, offer feedback, and view progress quickly and efficiently will harbor good relations and ensure your development runs smoothly.
Collaboration tools also help manage milestones and highlight inefficiencies.
Appstrax is always exploring new and innovative collaboration tools to ensure an effortless flow of feedback between ourselves and our clients.
Transparency
A great vendor will invite you to all strategic sessions during the planning phases to ensure that both parties’ understanding and expectations are aligned.
The development process, milestones, and resources will be shared in an easily accessible user-friendly environment.
Your technology partner should always be willing and open to share any knowledge they have regarding your project.
Appstrax understands the importance of transparency. That’s why we take every opportunity to include our clients in all the steps during the development process.
Best Practices
A great technology partner will follow the best development practices at all times. They will implement accepted coding standards, project version control, testing environments, regular code revisions, and testing.
Milestones and Review
A great vendor will provide a project overview with clear milestones that will be demonstrated and reviewed regularly.
Reviewing milestones is very important as it shows consistent progress and helps to identify bugs or concepts that need adjustment.
Appstrax conducts regular code reviews as well as progress demonstrations to ensure our quality and delivery is of the highest quality.
Discovery and Staying Agile
A great technology partner will have plenty of development experience and understand that a product is a living entity that continuously evolves.
Staying agile and allowing you to discover your product during the development sprints ensures that future sprints can be adjusted to accommodate for new discovery, reducing the need for massive revisions in the future.
Our team has lots of experience and understands the rapid rate at which technology and product solutions evolve. We embrace an agile approach to all our projects.
Diversity and Innovation
Your ideal technology partner will have a large team of specialized individuals with varying skill sets, allowing for creative solutions to your digital needs.
It’s also beneficial if your digital team has an even mix of experience levels, which ensures that new technologies get explored alongside tried and tested coding practices.
Our team at Appstrax has a culture focused on skill development and diversification. We are always looking for innovative solutions and encourage creative thinking.
Knowledge Sharing
A successful vendor will encourage its team to share knowledge and common pitfalls to short circuit the repetition of similar discovery and facilitate a faster service delivery.
While it’s not always easy to determine how well your digital partner’s team share their knowledge, you will be able to identify this when observing the interaction between team members in your meetings.
Appstrax has multiple platforms where team members share their knowledge and innovative solutions. We also provide various channels of communication open for team members to ask for help or advice from other peers who may have already encountered similar requirements in other projects.
Client Satisfaction
There is no better way to gauge a technology partner than on past successes.
If you want to know how capable your vendor is, get in touch with some of their clients and ask them questions regarding their experience with the vendor. Specifically ask them about milestone delivery, feedback sessions, and technical understanding.
If you can’t talk with a past client, ask for case studies that demonstrate their ability to deliver quality work or check listing directories and read review of old clients.
Conclusion
Choosing your technology partner is an important decision that you should not take lightly. Take your time to evaluate as many vendors as you can until you find the one that ticks all the boxes.
It’s important to find a vendor that you like with a good generational mix. They should openly communicate their strategies and progress, be conscious of and adhere to industry standards. You should get the feeling that they always have your products best interests in mind and are always willing to discover better ways of servicing your product.
At Appstrax, we are passionate about software development and service excellence. We have a diverse team of specialists and work closely with our project owners to deliver outstanding applications.
