7 Common Signs You Need to Outsource Your Project
Outsourcing is often cheaper than hiring your own team, and it is a trap that many fall into thinking they will loose money if they outsource project. We’ve identified some warning signs that it may be a good time to pass responsibility to a software development company.
Here are the 7 signs that you need to outsource your app project:
- You don’t have enough funds in the budget for full-time developers
- Lack of in-house expertise
- You have talent shortage
- You are afraid of risk
- You need to expand existing software to a new platform or language
- Business with demand peaks
- Short deadlines for software development
Learn more about each sign below :
1. You don’t have enough funds in the budget for full-time developers
Both startups and enterprises share the pain of having to search for, hire, and subsequently train a full-time developer to help with a project’s workload. This time consuming and costly measure can be simplified by bringing on a team of seasoned experts that just need to be briefed on your project requirements and expectations. Outsourcing is usually cheaper when you consider the cost of benefits, payroll, and long-term commitment, too!
2. Lack of in-house expertise
If you don’t have in-house expertise, it’s cost and time effective to outsource than to recruit and train new employees. This way, you focus on your core business and have the experts build it your product without delays.
Let’s assume you’ve identified a need to build a mobile application to support your business, but your software team isn’t experienced in mobile apps. Mobile app development is different from web and other software development work and requires a different strategy.
You need many different resources to build a mobile app, that many include Android programmer, iOS programmer, Mobile Architect, Product Manager, Tester, and Business Analyst. Hiring all these resources for just one project will likely be time consuming and expensive.
Ideally, you want to use an outside firm to build the initial product and then determine if you need to hire internally or continue to use outside help.
You’ll want to hire an expert, who has done this many times, so that your product meets or exceeds your expectations.
3. You have talent shortage
Finding the best developers for a project has always been challenging, but even more so today. LinkedIn’s annual Emerging Jobs Report says full stack developer jobs have seen a year-after-year growth of a whopping 35% since 2015. Because of this, finding talent is a time-consuming effort to search for and hire the right person. Outsourcing is a quick fix, allowing you to employ a temporary team to meet your deadlines.
4. You are afraid of risk
You can mitigate risks for your business by choosing an outsourcing firm that has a high-quality project management system and a tried-and-true process for developing applications.
5. You need to expand existing software to a new platform or language
Some companies see a need to update their software to use different languages. Reasons include security vulnerabilities, your plugins or APIs don’t support your current language, and difficulty finding developers for your current language.
Instead of burning time and capital to “re-do” a project for a new platform, use an outside team. Since your project is already complete, the specifications, expectations, design, and roadmap are already clear to anyone joining the project.
This frees up time for you to focus on working on feature requests and updates to the actual product, while making it easy for an outside team to join. Whether you’re collaborating or handing off that section, development companies make this easy!
6. Business with demand peaks
A business with demand peaks can suffer from inadequate staff or run inefficiently by having too many team members and not enough tasks. This is especially true for seasonal businesses or e-commerce businesses that peak on holidays. Instead of redistributing existing employees to loosely fitting roles, or hiring support solely for peak timings, consider a supplementary, outside team.
The benefit is you pay them only when you are at peak, leaving your full-time employees to focus on the tasks they were hired for.
7. Short deadlines for software development
If the deadlines for software development are very short, and you need to go through the whole process of hiring experts, software development, problem solving, testing and other items in the creation of the application, you definitely need to leave the project to a team of established experts who will develop your software in a much shorter time.
