Before developing a business application: Have a plan for value creation

Before you engage with developers to create your mobile application, consider ... how you will you know if the application is delivering results?  Do you have a clear idea of what success looks like? A first step is to determine how the application offers value.  And not just to you and your business, to be successful, it must provide value to all of its users.

Start by making a list of everyone that you want to engage with the application, directly and indirectly.  Let's say that you are creating an application to track wellness goals that communicate client status to a wellness coach.  Your list of users should at the very least include:

• The primary target audience of the person who is downloading and using the app. (User)
• Secondary audiences that are interacting with the person using the app, in this case, the wellness coach (Support)
• The organization that has the budget for creating and maintaining the application (Application owner)

The best way to know what users value is to ask them.  Then document the goals of each user group and come up with a set of quantifiable measures for how the application should assist in achieving each.  For example:

• Clients / Users:  "I need to stay motivated to achieve my wellness goals."
• Health Coaches:  "I need to be able to create wellness plans for multiple clients and keep track of their progress and interact with each one of them."
• Application Owner:  "We need to keep the cost of maintaining this application low.  Customer data needs to be kept secure.  Since our business model is evolving, we need to be able to make frequent software updates in response to user requests."

Put together a list of quantitative and qualitative measures for each of your users' goals.  Then determine how you will measure it.  Make sure that you have an easy way to track and measure your success indicators.  If they are too hard to capture, you'll either not track it or end up spending to much time on it.  Avoid creating additional applications to track and report  data until you are sure that the data is valuable and needed over the long term. 
 
Next, put a strategy in place for how you will ensure that you have a plan to mitigate value loss.  What will you do if users are not interacting with the application?  Often forgotten is a plan for monitoring success and strategies or mitigating problems.     What can you put in place to prevent a problem and what do you plan to do to react if the application is not meeting the goals?  

Even if you are not an application development expert, taking the time to think through each of these areas will make it easier for you to discuss your requirements with whomever you hire to develop the technology. And being sure of how the application creates value is a step that will help avert disappointing results, and costly redo's in the future.

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