Let’s Go Outside!

Making the choice to hire an external company is not an easy choice when it comes to software development. With so many businesses hiring very professional and competent software developers, it often does not seem to be logical to hire an external team to solve any internal software related issues. However, hiring an external team has many benefits to your organization, including the continued appropriate use of the company’s resources. Below are the top five benefits we believe you gain from hiring an external software development studio:

1. External eyes to analyze the issue – When you hire an external software development studio, you are also hiring a consultative service. This consultative service can help you understand the problem, and measure the scope of the issue. This non-biased background work will ensure that the software solution will fix the problem.The internal roadblock: The internal development team may be too close to the problem to be able to fully analyze the scope. This would create an incomplete, or incorrect software solution for the issue. This would not be ideal for a company, as then they would have to spend more time developing and tweaking, as well as spending further money on the issue.
2. The best possible solution will be recommended – When interacting with the an external software development studio, you are inviting a team into your organization, and your company. The priority of the external development team is the problem plaguing your organization. This means they are looking for the best possible software solution for the problem.The internal roadblock: The internal team knows the organization, and knows their colleagues. The individual team members are likely looking for career progression and recognition. These motivations could cause the solution recommended not to be tailored to the well-defined problem, but to the opinion and tastes of the individuals in charge. Once again, this risks not solving the issue correctly the first time, and causes a waste of company resource (time, money, talent) on solving the problem continually.
3. The quality of the solution is paid for – When partnering with an external software development studio, you are the customer, and the software solution is the fully customized product you are purchasing. This means that the development studio is motivated and incentivized to ensure the product they are programming is to the highest possible standard.The internal roadblock: Though your team is incentivized to perform their best work through their salaries and a possible bonus structure, they are not motivated to work on an internal issue, especially if they are not a stakeholder in the outcome. This is because your team was hired for a specific purpose, to work on the product that your company has developed and is selling. So, when they are distracted by attempting to program and solve an internal issue, the quality of the product may not be to as high of a standard.
4. Hiring an external company is cheaper than in-house development – When you hire an external software development studio, the cost to build the software solution is often  2-3 times less than building the same software solution in house! This is because an external studio is able to re-use different portions of code from different projects. As the projects the software development studio is programming change often and quickly, the external company is able to build up a large code database they can quickly reuse. Re-using the components is also a huge positive, as it allows each component to be tested many times, reducing the amount of bugs that have to be resolved later.The internal roadblock: An internal development team is more expensive for a myriad of reasons. Not only do they not have the same resource of pre-written code to access, but you are also paying their salaries directly. When you work with an external software development studio, you are able to effectively share and split the cost of the developer’s salary among many different projects, helping reduce the cost. As they’re programming everything from the beginning, development will also take longer, and require a lot of testing to ensure the software is able to function correctly. This extended timeline also increases the cost.
5. Building a team is not easy – A software development studio is an established, high functioning unit. The members of the studio have been interviewed, hired, and are the correct cultural fit for the specific challenges and projects the software development studio is hired to program.The internal roadblock: The internal software team may not have the necessary skillset to complete the software as the problem requires. The cost of hiring a person, in a very hot Toronto market, is extreme. The time spent attempting to find the correct culture fit, in addition to ensuring the future employee has the correct skillset for the task, and loyalty to the company is a huge resource drain.