Let’s say you have a huge software project that your company has to complete in time. It’s natural to look at the IT staff and software developers you have on staff and say, “Well, why can’t these guys do it? I’m already paying them!”
That’s a mistake.
Though many executives still think outsourcing their software development is a way to spend more money on worse engineers and unreliable applications, that’s almost the opposite of the truth.
A great third-party software-development team can increase your efficiency, deliver exactly what you want, and help you meet your deadlines.
You’re free to take care of your core business
Outsourced developers free you up to focus your attention where it should be: on your real business. Instead of worrying about managing in-house IT guys to get your new delivery app finished on time, you hand over the details to a team for whom software is their core business. Too many times have we witnessed a company trying to save money by developing an app in house, only to end up seeing them losing way more by forgetting to keep their focus on their core business.
It’s easier to find specialists
It’s unlikely your in-house development team has all the knowledge or skill set you need for every software project — there’s just too much to learn in the tech world for this to be possible.
That’s when you call in an outsourced team.
Say your restaurant chain’s venturing into online delivery for the first time. Getting a custom mobile app out there will be key to the whole planit working. You need third-party mobile specialists who can either support the developers you have on staff or who can take the load off the in-house team’s shoulders entirely.
At Plan A Technologies, we’ve found that our specialists are in high demand, so we’ve met that need from our clients by making sure we have experts in all major programming languages.
It costs less to outsource
A full-time employee costs you a lot more than their salary. Once you include benefits, time off, workspace, computer and offices, supplies, taxes and more, each staff member actually costs up to 1.5 times their stated salary.
With a third-party developer, you pay what it says on the contract and the developer’s outsourcing firm absorbs the rest. Think of it as up to an automatic 33% discount to get the same amount of work done. Many of our customers have been pleasantly surprised by how much they saved by hiring a third-party development company.
Projects get done faster
Doing software projects yourself takes more time. Your in-house development team has to get training to familiarize themselves with tech specializations they don’t already have. If you’re hiring staff developers to do these projects, you’ll be spending weeks or months on recruitment, interviews, onboarding and all the rest — and that’s before they write their first line of code.
Outsourced software-development teams can jump in almost the day after they’ve been hired, with none of the inevitable delays you encounter with training or hiring. Some of our clients have asked us to deliver with very short deadlines, and they’ve always been glad they hired a third party to get results faster than they could have on their own.
Your managers are freer to work on other tasks
Software projects aren’t just about the developers. To bring a project to completion, each project needs managers who see the big picture and make sure developers are meeting internal deadlines so that the whole team can move ahead. If your in-house team is in charge of writing code and managing the coders, a big chunk of your staff suddenly isn’t available to attend to their other responsibilities.
A competent outsourced development team gives your managerial and human-resources teams the time to do their jobs while the third-party team’s project managers direct the programmers and make sure the project’s done right and on time. At Plan A, we make sure our developers and managers know what to prioritize and what can wait, and they have the leadership experience to connect the people who need to work together to make an asset or component perfect.
You don’t have to fire anyone down the line
If you ignored our advice from earlier and ended up adding a full-time specialist to your staff for a specific project, you may find yourself in a very awkward and unpleasant situation once the project’s done. Now you find that you’re still paying the salary (and everything else) for someone you don’t need anymore. Doing it without a third-party developer’s help means that the budget for that one-off software project didn’t end when the app launched — it’ll live on as long as you’re paying the developers you brought onto staff. So your choice is now is to spend yet more money on new (but unnecessary) projects that fit your new staffer’s specialty, to keep paying an employee to do a lot less than they were hired for, or to fire them. And none of those are great options.
By hiring us, many of our clients have avoided making painful decisions like those, because once the project is done, we take our developers to work on another project somewhere else — you don’t have to keep paying anyone, they stay busy, and no one has to fire anyone.
This article originally appeared in Spanish on Yogonet.
