What do you actually seek from external support? Identify what’s preventing you from completing a project on time and within budget

Let’s make it clear: if the capabilities are there, a project is best delivered internally. Sometimes, however, we are missing certain capabilities that are required to deliver said project in a realistic timeline. These may be related to skills (e.g. technical expertise, domain experience), budget (hiring locally is too expensive) or just capacity (not enough manpower). What are good reasons for outsourcing software development?

The answer to the question from the title should be the thing that’s preventing you from completing a project on time and within budget. As mentioned earlier, these fall into one of the following categories:

For each of these, let’s explore some example business stories and how they translate into specific metrics that are relevant to your needs.

Knowledge

Have a look at the following business cases where knowledge is the primary added value:

“I want to build an MVP for pre-seed capital I secured. I know what I want, but I’ve never managed a development team and don’t know how to start. I have a colleague who was willing to help out as CTO, but he backed off and left me alone. I’m looking for a partner who will help me to turn my ideas into a digital product.”

– Sheila, startup founder

“We develop our web application internally but a planned feature includes advanced data visualization and we’re concerned if our front-end developer can handle it. We’re looking for a front-end developer with experience in complex UX/UI who can temporarily join our team and help us deliver this feature.” (example project: tablet app for water leak locator)

– Dave, Team Lead

“Our product needs to be integrated with a specific 3rd party application. We don’t want to distract our internal team from their priorities and we also want to make sure the integration is done right. We want the feature to be developed by someone recommended by that 3rd party or who has already integrated with this application in the past.”

– Matt, CTO

“We have a successful SaaS product and want to provide our customers access through a mobile app. We don’t want to hire a mobile developer because it would take him too long to finish it alone and after that we won’t have enough work for him to justify a full-time position. We are looking for an external partner, who can deliver this app and later do maintenance and bugfixes from time to time.”

– Joanna, Head of Product

“I need to build a customer portal to streamline our services (CXP) and it has to look good. Most of my platform is for internal usage so I am fine with basic UI but the user-facing part needs the right attention from people with a strong UI/UX design background.“ (example project: customer experience portal for cybersecurity company)

– Claire, Head of Customer Success

“We already had a great product with a loyal customer base but recently investors made us scale up ASAP, so we expanded operations and now our application is really slow. My internal team is suggesting potential improvements but I am afraid of significant changes without someone who had experience with such transitions and optimizations.”

– Steve, CTO

“I’ve built an MVP of my startup in AWS/Azure but in order to scale sales we need to also serve customers who, due to compliance, need to run it on their own hardware.”

– Xavier, Head of Business Development

If any of the above examples sounds familiar, prioritize experience (lower risk) and technical expertise (better quality) when looking for an outsourcing Partner. The metric you’re most interested in is insights, i.e. how much they know.

Savings

Have a look at the following business cases where savings are the main decision driver:

“I want to build an MVP for pre-seed capital I secured. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to develop it locally, because I will run out of money before the MVP is ready. I’m looking for a partner who won’t ruin my budget”.

– Richard, SaaS co-founder

“We received Round A funding and are expected to deliver a large set of features soon. Unfortunately, we haven’t reached our funding goals which means we won’t have the budget to hire enough in-house developers. We are looking for external support, which will deliver the features within our budget”

– Tom, CTO