Are you a small business? Do you need software development services? Do you want to train your own IT specialists, get a high-quality product with a long service life and long-term high-quality technical support, and at the same time save money? Forget about it, because the only reasonable solution in your case is to outsource software development. There are at least five good arguments for this, which we will now consider.
Staff
As you know, your staff are critical for getting things done. But where do you find qualified employees? How many employees do you need exactly to implement your IT solution? How do you verify the qualifications of the employees that you find? How can you keep a team that you assembled together after completing work on the project? Every employer must wrangle with these types of questions.
If software development is the main activity of your organisation, you will of course create a structural unit for solving these types of issues. But when the activity of your small business is not related to IT, there is absolutely no point in creating such a unit: you should fully outsource your software development, not concern yourself with staffing issues, and focus on your core business.
Time
No one will solve the problem faster than an experienced team of professional developers! Have you ever thought about how you will recruit, train, and rally your team to work on one of your projects? Think again. Add the time that you will spend on finding and training employees, and then double (at the very least) this amount time to obtain a more realistic picture.
You will soon come to the obvious conclusion: no matter how hard you try, you will never create an IT solution using your own resources faster than if you use a team of dedicated outsourcers who are ready to start working on your project here and now without requiring any additional hoops to jump through.
Quality
Obviously, if all you have is a one-time need for software development, it would not be advisable to recruit permanent employees to fulfil this role: once they finish your project, you will simply not have anything more to assign them to do. In this situation, who is able to create a better solution: an organisation that works on such solutions on a professional basis 24 hours per day, seven days per week, or employees who are hired for a particular project but who work with the understanding that their working relationship with you will end as soon as they turn it in?
The answer is obvious.
For an outsourcer, creating a quality product is a guarantee not only of survival on the market and the ability to make a profit here and now, but also a necessary condition for minimising the cost of subsequent technical support for the developed solution. The team that is assembled to carry out a particular project usually only has one goal: to get the money. What happens afterwards is no longer interesting.
Support
It is a known fact that technical support for an out-of-the-box IT solution takes many fewer staff and time resources than the actual development, and also minimally affects the quality of an already available solution. It is not a good idea to provide your own support using your own human resources. The time that a system developer and third-party developer spend on solving issues can often vary a lot.
In most cases, an individual third-party developer is not familiar with the architecture of the system (and cannot always learn it that quickly) and does not simultaneously possess all the skills that are necessary to solve problems that can be encountered with a template IT solution (administration, server and client side development, and mobile development). As a result, no one will be able to handle your support issues faster and better than an outsourcing team, which preferably includes the actual developer of the solution.
Money
All of the above factors come down to one basic factor: money. Solving staffing issues, time costs, quality control, and subsequent support of the implemented IT solution: all of these have definite financial costs. Should you develop a solution using your own resources? Be ready to pay money to HR managers and the development team. Be aware that the development process will take significantly longer.
Be prepared for the fact that the quality of the solution that your company develops on its own will be lower than that prepared by an outsourcer, and the cost of providing independent technical support will be many times higher.
In addition, if your firm is located in a country with a high level of taxes, then outsourcing your company’s software development needs to another country can be a real godsend for you: you will not have to pay the higher taxes on your own employees’ salaries!
For example, in the USA, where at the beginning of the 20th century one dollar out of every 12 earned dollars was paid in taxes, now one in every three dollars goes to taxes, and this share promises to increase. Are you ready to bear such costs even when you have an option where you can completely and legally avoid them?
In conclusion: if you are a small business, need software development, value your time and money, and want the best quality, then outsourcing your software development projects is the only feasible option.
Yana Yelina is a Copywriter at Oxagile.
Further reading on outsourcing software development
