It’s highly likely you already have an impression of what it means to outsource software development.
The definition of outsourcing is extremely broad and covers anything and everything completed by a ‘3rd party’ to support your business.
With the definition being so broad it can leave the landscape very confusing, equally, it means that there is a range of ways to help you and your business be successful.
There are typically 3 ways to outsource your software development, which you can find out more about on our what's the best way to outsource for you? blog.
When outsourcing you will find that dependent on your partner of choice that you will gain a large degree of flexibility against an internal team. You will also find that you have additional control over the amount of ‘resource’ you have available giving you the flexibility to increase or decrease the amount of support you need with your businesses seasonality or growth needs.
Dependent on your partner of choice they will have a wealth of experience deploying a range of software solutions, with that experience you get a host of benefits across every stage of your partnership, whether that be with a project and for example the scoping stage where an understanding of what challenges have occurred in similar projects which means they can be avoided before they come up, and asking questions to ensure that the final solution is tightly aligned with your businesses processes and needs, reducing the need for development or for your business to have internal workarounds.
There is a vast amount of data available that discusses the cost benefits ranging from the subjective, with the time needed to develop a solution to the more objective, with a direct comparison of the cost of hiring a team, which includes not just the wages of the employees, it also factors in the onboarding costs of those employees. You can find a more detailed breakdown of those costs on our Cost of Insourcing blog.
Essentially depending on where you are located the annual wage of an experienced developer who would be capable of developing that solution can be as high as £80,000 pa, and that is if you can find a developer to hire which is a completely different issue.
Much like cost savings, time savings range from the clear to the less tangible. Depending on how you engage with your partner of choice you will experience a variety of time savings. One example is if you and the business have agreed that you would like to develop a new system whether that be a quoting tool, ordering tool, booking tool and your in-house resource is currently at capacity or you need to build an internal team.
This will mean you will need to hire the right person to start the project, removing the cost elements involved this will likely mean you will need to design a job brief for a consultant so they can scope the project for you, you will then need to brief a recruiter (internal or external) to provide you with some candidates, which you will need to interview, then they will have a notice period and then finally they will need to be onboard with yourself, and this could be repeated if they aren't the right fit for the business.
These are the headline reasons why outsourcing is a great way to support your businesses development if you want to find out more about why Cold Banana is the right partner for you and your business, get in touch.