When your company plans a new software development project, the first question you should ask yourself is, “Do we have the staff to pull this off?”
It’s a critical question, one that many companies struggle to answer. Why? Some companies have trouble evaluating their staff’s capability. On top of that, most of those higher up the food chain don’t really have the ability to navigate the complex waters of software engineering. Because of that, it’s very easy to assume any software development department can successfully produce any project.
But can they? If you can’t make that call with 100% certainty, it might be time for you to consider outsourcing the project at hand.
But is your company a good fit for outsourcing? Let’s see if we can help you out with that question.
Essential vs. Extended Business Functions
One of the first things you must consider is whether or not the project at hand serves an essential or an extended function. The last thing you want is to make the core of your business reliant on outsourcing. To answer that question, you must then understand what is considered a core function for your business.
Is eCommerce a core function? If that’s the case, chances are good you don’t want to outsource that portion of your business. However, is data analysis a core function? Maybe parts of your eCommerce platform rely on data, but it may not be a key functionality. You might depend on data analysis for marketing and customer relations, but maybe you consider that secondary to actually selling products.
If that’s your business, you would keep eCommerce in house and maybe outsource the development of data analysis tools. By outsourcing this functionality, you could get a number of benefits, including:
- Transferred workload – which will take the weight off your in-house team, to free them up to focus on day-to-day issues.
- Reduce labor costs – outsourced teams can bypass hours of sourcing, interviewing, and training.
- Fill temporal and specialized positions – allows you to temporarily hire very specialized talent.
- Access world-class talent – opens up a massive talent pool for your project.
- Minimal technical risks – brings to your project faster problem solving and minimal downtime.
- Reduced launch time – a distributed team can deliver faster results.
Outside of getting a project completed, one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing a project (or even a portion of a project) is that your in-house staff can then place all of their focus on core business functions. That means when something breaks, you have the staff on hand to immediately fix it. If you’ve pulled those staff members away to focus on non-core business functionality, your company could suffer a disruption in service.
Much needed expertise
This is another area where it becomes incredibly important for those calling the shots to have a full understanding of their in-house talent pool. Your business may very well need to extend the capability of the eCommerce solution you have. Say, for instance, that your eCommerce platform could be better optimized with the addition of blockchain. Your company, however, doesn’t have any blockchain developers in-house.
What do you do?
Do you:
- Take the time to go through the hiring process to bring on enough blockchain specialists to make this happen?
- Give your in-house staff the time to learn how to successfully integrate blockchain into your pipeline?
- Or do you outsource that portion of the project to a nearshore company that offers blockchain expertise?
Any manager, CEO, CTO, or COO would make the wise decision and outsource that portion of the project. You never know if, after spending the time to get up to speed with blockchain, your in-house staff will be able to rise to the occasion.
By outsourcing this portion of the project to specialists, you are guaranteed success.
Take BairesDev, one of the most popular companies for Latin American outsourcing, as an example. Our hiring process is thorough:
- An applicant applies for a position.
- The applicant is required to take online tests.
- If the applicant passes the online tests, they then go through an HR interview.
- The next step is the written tests.
- Should the applicant pass the written tests, they are then brought in for a technical interview.
- If the applicant passes the technical interview, they can be assigned projects.
Does your company have time to go through such an extensive interview process for every new project that requires specific development skills? If not, outsourcing might be your best route to success. One of the most frustrating aspects of the traditional hiring process is the length of time it takes to find the right candidate. When you need that project completed quickly (and with a certain guarantee of success), outsourcing is probably your best bet.
By outsourcing this portion of the project to specialists, you are guaranteed success.
Take BairesDev, one of the most popular companies for Latin American outsourcing, as an example. Our hiring process is thorough:
What’s best for your business?
Finally, you must decide what is best for your business. Instead of comparing your company to what other companies do, you must remember you and your business are unique. To that end, whether or not your competition has worked with outsourcing should have no bearing on if you do.
Instead, you must carefully examine what would serve your company best. And where a competitor has weaknesses, you may not. For example, if your biggest competitor has focused most of their development effort on Kubernetes, whereas you’ve opted to go the Java route, that competitor might be able to scale faster than you. However, your competitor’s ability to deploy mobile apps might not be as strong as yours. If you need to meet their ability to scale, you’re not going to do so with Java. To that end, you might outsource Kubernetes
But it’s important for you to know what’s truly best for your business. And although your standard operating procedure might be to always hire in-house, you must compare the risk to the guaranteed success. Although it might “feel” better to have an in-house talent pool capable of doing anything you throw at them, reality dictates that’s a significant challenge. Taking the risk of outsourcing might seem a bit counter-intuitive to how you’ve done business in the past – but if you’re looking for guaranteed success, the choice becomes quite obvious.
Conclusion
This doesn’t have to be a terribly difficult decision to make. In fact, you’ll probably find that, once you’ve outsourced your first project, you’ll wonder why you ever hesitated to begin with. And if you want to hire some of the best talent on the planet, look no further than BairesDev.
