Everywhere you look, tech innovations are changing the business landscape. Visionary research is coming to life in the form of cutting-edge technology, global processes are tightly interwoven in a dance of digital genesis, and machine-learning AI technologies are steadily finding their way into every office. You know that, if your business wants to maintain a competitive edge, it’s critical that you take advantage of some of these innovations to optimize business processes, enhance offerings, and improve long-term client relationships. But keeping up is easier said than done.
In reality, your IT department is too overwhelmed maintaining your old systems to complete a simple initiative the organization planned two years ago. Or worse, you still run your business on Excel spreadsheets, tracking tasks through a waterfall of emails, and deadlines and data are starting to slip through the cracks. You’ve expanded your team to handle the overflow, but new hire training and HR management are eating away at your time and budget, diverting more and more resources from the actual work.
You’ve tried to get on top of it — you’ve experimented with a dozen free task management apps, and you’ve subscribed to CRMs, ERPs, CPQs — so many three-letter-acronym SaaS offerings you’ve covered the whole alphabet. But you are still no closer to getting the functionality you need.
Clearly, it’s time for a new approach.
You need expert help. You need a team of reliable professionals who are as competent (maybe even more so) and charming (impossible) as you are to take the burden of project management off your shoulders and give the existing IT team some relief. Of course, you also need this team to be affordable and highly efficient.
Sounds impossible?
It’s not, if you outsource it.
7 Reasons to Outsource Software Development
Some folks are skeptical about the idea of outsourcing work that could potentially be done in house, but hiring a third party to take the load off the organization’s shoulders can have a lot of advantages — if you hire the right third party. Just like any hiring process, if you do your homework and put in your due diligence to find the perfect vendor, outsourcing your software needs may be the smartest move your organization can make. Here’s why:
1. Cost Savings
Let’s take a look at the cost of hiring a new full-time employee. There’s the annual salary, sure, but there are also benefits like health insurance, as well as the cost of recruiting (up to 25 percent of the employee’s salary if you use a recruiting service, or dozens of hours of your time if you do it yourself) and the time spent onboarding. Research shows it can take up to twenty-six weeks for a new hire to be fully up to speed. So that’s six-plus months on payroll before the new recruit is at optimal productivity — not to mention the lost productivity from other team members’ time spent training their new colleague.
By choosing to outsource your development team, you avoid all of those hiring and training costs, and you pay far less per engineer than the annual salary of a full-time employee. That’s because you aren’t forced to compete with the Googles and Facebooks of the world for their salary potential, and in all likelihood, you’ll be able to partner with a vendor whose developers are based in a less-expensive part of the world. So, if you’re a San Francisco startup, rather than finding ways to pay average, entry-level employees a wage that covers the exorbitant rents, you can pay a vendor rate that more than covers living expenses for expert developers who live in lower-rent areas (Algothic’s world-class software engineers, for example, are based in Europe).
2. Removing Human Resources from the Equation
Cost of HR functions aside, recruitment, training, and employee scheduling can be nightmares in and of themselves. But when you outsource software development, those burdens fall on the vendor’s shoulder, and not yours. No more lost productivity due to unexpected sick days, no more time spent bouncing around university career fairs, and no more worrying whether you’ve found the absolute best applicant. With the right vendor partnership, you can rest assured that all of those things are taken care of, and you’ve got a quality team working to help you achieve your goals.
3. Project Management and Planning
If you’ve been heading up in-house efforts to bring your organization into the digital era, you’ve likely felt the pressures of project management slowly overtaking the joys of higher-level strategy and vision. But quality software development vendors can take the logistics off your plate, employing industry-standard project management processes and engineering methods that they’ve fine-tuned to perfection in their specialized environment. (After all, while this work is a distraction for you, it’s a key function of your vendor’s business.)
4. On-Demand Scalability
When your in-house team hits an unexpected obstacle, when a change in requirements means work needs to be redone, or when a project turns out to be bigger than anticipated, it becomes a game of reallocating resources to make sure all hands are on deck and the crew is working around the clock.
On the flip side, if the project is less intensive than you’d thought, the result is employees sitting around twiddling their thumbs — and taking home a salary for it. But with a third-party vendor, you can scale your project on demand, adding (or removing) team members to adjust capacity and service structure as needed.
5. Renewed Time & Resources for the Core Business
Having all of these logistics and headaches taken care of frees up you and your in-house team to take care of tasks relating to the core of your business — from product and service development to stellar customer service to expansion plans. If you’ve picked a quality vendor, your new team is fully invested in your business, building the software solutions you need to achieve and exceed your goals for revenue, brand reputation, and growth.
6. Specific, Relevant Expertise
Software engineering is a broad skillset that can include expertise in any of dozens of coding languages and technologies. For example, you may have an in-house developer who’s a whiz at Ruby on Rails, but when your project calls for a different framework, he’s at a loss.
And there’s another area where a quality vendor comes in handy. At Algothic, for example, our team of 200-plus software engineers includes experts in any mainstream technology you need. That means your software solutions aren’t limited to what your engineers can do — instead, they’re built exactly to suit your needs and specifications.
7. Standard Global Model
When you get right down to it, outsourcing is much more common than you might think. One way or the other even the tech behemoths like Google or Microsoft use outsourcing services. In this world where expertise is at a premium, outsourcing allows businesses of all sizes to stay competitive by contracting work out to the most qualified talent so they can invest their money elsewhere. From ramping up R&D to simply keeping product and service prices low, cutting expenses through outsourcing gives organizations much more financial freedom.
Whether you’re looking to build a mobile app for your customers, connect a product to the Internet of Things, or streamline your back-office processes with a custom ERP, these projects can pose a serious drain on resources for companies that take them on in-house. Outsourcing custom software solutions will enable your organization to save time, money, and hassle, focusing on the big picture and trusting the execution to the experts.
Without a doubt, finding the right partner for the job is a rewarding journey and might help you uncover a whole new paradigm of business processes. Just make that first step.
