Have you decided your business finally needs an IT consultant? First, get referrals for IT consulting firms from colleagues, business partners, and social media connections. Determine what issue you need help with, is it a short-term or ongoing concern; what is a general range for your budget.

Here is a checklist of questions for IT consulting companies you can use:

• How much experience does the company have in general?
• How much experience do they have with your domain?
• Have they worked on similar projects/systems/software before?
• What industry certifications do they have, and how up-to-date are those?
• Are they vendor-authorized? (is a team trained to meet a specific vendor's standards)

• Who will be you be working with — a consultant, a business analytic, or a technical specialist?
• Are they fluent in the language you speak?
• How often will the consultant meet with you, and what channels do they use?
• Do they provide training for you and your team after new technology is introduced?

• What are the payment terms?
• How are the fees set (hourly, per project, etc.)?
• How are unforeseen costs handled and billed?
• Do they have liability insurance? What guarantees do they provide? How are you compensated if the last are not met?
• How do they respond to emergencies?

Pay attention to how much time the IT consulting firm representatives spent on the response. How quick and thoughtful are these responses? Is this company proactive? (not to be confused with annoying!)

In good communication we trust. Firstly, it's about:

The client is always looking for a trustworthу service provider who can provide a fully-fledged IT consulting process.

Where to entrust your product development is particularly important due to differences in several aspects. Let's highlight them briefly.

RESEARCH

Based on the goals you have in place already, then you research to discover IT consulting agencies that fit your plans and budget the best.

Where to look for the best IT consulting firm and how not to be mistaken?

EVALUATE

Once you have found consulting agencies that match your requirements, the next step is to evaluate them.

1) Reviews. Get insides about the consulting company's previous partnership. Check independent ratings and reviews on such platforms as Clutch.co, GoodFirms, etc. With the mentioned sources, you'll get useful information about the firm's relationship with clients, its attention to detail, and its expertise.

2) Team members. Since you are looking for a whole IT consulting company, you should have complex information on the members of the team. How skilled they are? Are there specialists with experience in your business domain? What kind of experts are available? Apart from devs, do they also have engineers, DevOps, business analysts?

3) Portfolio. An extra step of reaching out to the company's successful projects can give you detailed information about its skills and expertise. At this point, you should be looking to ensure that the IT firm has consulted a similar company to yours.

4) Infrastructure. One of the core benefits of IT consulting services comes from the lack of needed infrastructure. Therefore, it only makes sense that your consulting partner has all the required infrastructure that your business lacks.

GET IN TOUCH

After researching consulting agencies you prefer, the next step would be to have a physical meeting or a video call.

The aim is to understand the company's work conditions and agree on the most crucial details, including:

• Necessary clarifications regarding tech background
• Rough cost estimation
• Rough time estimation
  
• Failure response

From day-to-day management to top-level support, Freshcode is on-hand to help, working towards your business improvement.

We want to share a story about our collaboration with HiRasmus, the digital platform providing access to specialized medical care via eConsultation.

Our partnership started as consulting, which subsequently developed into a comprehensive collaboration.

Here are the main reasons why the client needed an IT consultant to solve his business challenges.

We handled consulting service in the following communication channels:

• Google Meet
• Slack
• Email messaging

Over time, the project has expanded and grown. Together we drew up a business plan that helped get funding and bring on new business partners. Today HiRasmus is a HIPAA-compliant app that provides access to the leading autism treatment programs and specialists for children.

For 7 years now Freshcode has been helping organizations to improve and modernize their IT strategies. Some of our IT experts have worked in the industry for over 15 years. This has allowed us to craft a profitable approach to IT consulting that enables us to deliver maximum benefits in the shortest possible time.

Today is the best time to reevaluate your existing business tools and replace outdated and inefficient ones.

A professional IT consulting company should be a multifunctional and 'full-stack' partner providing the right services at the right time for the partners' product growth.

We at Freshcode are ready to enrich your workflow and improve productivity with digital technologies, delivering greater business results. Our team provides a full-service package of assistance for IT projects – we plan, design, implement and continuously support technology-powered solutions.

Do you want to discover more digital solutions for your business as well as ways to implement them through consulting services?

The Freshcode team is ready to help and discuss all possible opportunities in confidence. Book a free consultation here.