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Before you decide to develop software exclusively in-house, it’s important to consider the main challenges often encountered when developing in-house. In this article, we’ll break down 6 of the most common of these challenges and showcase how an external development partnership can easily solve and/or eliminate them.
1. Costs associated with in-house hiring
Let’s face it: building and maintaining a performant development team capable of taking on diverse projects requires a significant investment of the two most essential resources – time and money.
On top of that, in order to be as effective as possible, the hiring process is rarely smooth, with multiple interviews that often involve key technical roles such as the CTO, development manager or another tech lead role.
The catch? These are very often precisely the personnel that are likely already dedicating a lot of their available time to the project/product you’re hiring new developers for in the first place, and whose workload you want to ease with this process rather than adding to it.
In contrast, an external development partner can greatly smoothen this process and eliminate most of the costs associated with in-house developers, especially in longer term partnership with a development firm you’ve already collaborated with before.
That way, you don’t need to vet them every single time you need extra development capacities, and you’re always able to get new reliable developers quickly and cost-effectively.
2. Investment into internal employee experience & employee overhead
In addition to the investment in hiring, it’s also key to consider the investment into your existing in-house development team. Naturally, this includes all of the developers’ salaries, but also other overhead expenses such as sick and vacation leaves, equipment and office perks.
Of course, you’ll also have to invest into a company culture that prioritizes a great employee experience, with a healthy work-life balance and a particular focus on the developer experience.
Besides must-haves such as team-building activities and other internal events, you’ll need to provide meaningful opportunities for learning/upskilling and career advancement, including effective onboarding and mentorship programs, all of which will require investment in order to be sustainable and scalable.
If you instead decide to outsource your development, or a part of it, to a specialized development provider, your only expense will be the cost for the specific amount of time worked, and the only extra task you’ll need to take care of will be the basic onboarding of the partner company's developers into your workflows. All employee overhead expenses will be covered by the partner company and thus invisible to you.
3. Tunnel vision
Another typical issue that can occur when keeping development exclusively in-house is tunnel vision of people involved in the development process. I.e., they may be so focused on specific requirements of a particular project such as stakeholder needs that they completely fail to consider certain basic features such as accessibility.
An outside objective perspective can often elucidate the bigger picture and help quickly identify potential shortcomings and/or risks of failure. The sooner you include an external development partner in the process, the more valuable and effective their contribution and the resulting collaboration will be, minimizing or altogether avoiding any necessary reworking.
4. Narrow expertise
When working on longer projects and/or in-house closed software, it’s often more difficult for developers to expand their expertise beyond the technologies they’re working with daily, and they have to broaden their skills on personal projects in their free time.
With an external development provider, you not only typically get to collaborate with developers who have honed their expertise across a variety of projects and technologies, you can also get exactly the right developers for your current needs, and you’re able to get new developers as the market shifts and your needs change.
This is particularly relevant for digital agencies and other firms & organizations that tend to not have strong in-house development (e.g. nonprofit organizations, universities), as well as product teams with deep expertise in one particular technology but shallow expertise in other key technologies required for a successful product.
5. Experts leaving company
Imagine the following scenario. One of your longest employed in-house senior developers decides to leave the company in search of new opportunities, taking away deep knowledge of your legacy codebase. What do you do if this person was the only person left at your company who originally wrote the code and took care of its maintenance?
It of course helps significantly if you’ve properly documented the development process in order to facilitate new developers joining the project to get onboarded quickly, work on it effectively, minimize technical debt and prevent things from breaking.
But you still have to spend time and money in finding the right replacement, and even then you can’t guarantee that they’ll seamlessly take over the work from the former expert. With an external development partner, by contrast, you can easily get a replacement with adequate expertise in case someone from their team leaves their company.
6. Greatly impacted by feast vs. famine cycles
Many companies have experienced this pattern: you hire more in-house developers during a “feast” cycle (i.e. a period with a significant increase in new work and opportunities), expending precious resources in the process, only to then have to bench (or, even worse, lay off) those developers in periods of “famine” where there’s significantly less work than when you were actually recruiting them.
Or, if you know you’ll need them again in the future and can’t afford to lay them off and then potentially rehire for similar positions later (which is in itself not exactly the best of practices), you’ll likely have to just keep them on your payroll and incur the resulting overhead, which risks canceling out the initial value they’ve brought to your development.
An external development provider, however, is able to easily and quickly adapt to your changing needs and allow you to have swift and effective responses to market shifts, no matter how disruptive these shifts may be.
They’re able to upsize or downsize depending on your current situation, only charging for the actual time worked unless specifically arranged (e.g. with retainers, maintenance, etc.). This allows you to remain agile in your development process while greatly reducing the traditional costs of in-house developers (see point 1 above).
Conclusion
While investing into in-house development capabilities brings a lot of advantages, it also comes with its own set of drawbacks, especially for companies and organizations that aren’t digital-first or development-oriented, but still need a strong digital infrastructure.
For those companies, a partnership with a specialized development company is often exactly what they need to establish a strong digital presence and provide great digital experiences to their audiences.
If any of the scenarios we’ve broken down in this article are familiar to you and you would like to avoid them in future projects, reach out to us to find out how we can boost your development capacities with our seasoned development experts.
