Set yourself up for outsourcing success in 2021

Hello, 2021

2020 was a weird year. Many are glad to have it in the past. But in the positive column, we saw a lot of nice developments, including:

• Scale of remote work
• More digital transformation projects
• Increased virtual collaboration
• Some industries truly thriving
• Contactless payments
• Rise of e-commerce even more
• Increased need for automated projects

Now we’re in 2021, and it’s a perfect storm for working with an outsourcing partner, for some of these fundamental reasons:

• Cost containment and margins are tight: An outsourced team of experts gets you more value at cost than building a team through hiring.
• Remote hiring is hard: A series of video calls don’t necessarily do justice to the person you are trying to hire; you may hire the wrong people or have “buyer’s remorse.”
• Pivots: COVID has made the pivot very necessary. To pivot, you need people with a lot of different types of expertise, who have worked on different projects. It’s easier to get that with an outsourced partner who has worked across different industries, different programming languages, different project management methods, etc.
• Specialization and expertise: With outsourced partners, you get developers who are specialized, but also have a mix of general expertise across different fundamentals of software work. This gives you a wider scope of innovation possibility than simply hiring people focused on one language or one industry.

If this is the year you double down on outsourcing, what do you need to be thinking about and focusing on?

Looking for a software development outsourcing partner

These are the questions that you, as a company, need to be asking yourselves:

• What are our goals this year?
• What industries are we looking to work within?
• What innovative projects have we not yet been able to launch?
• What is our cost structure?
• Where are our internal employees the busiest?
• Where do we lack the most knowledge?
• What spaces (AI, ML, etc.) do we want to explore but we haven’t?

 Here are some questions that you, as a company, should then ask potential outsourcing partners:

• Can we see examples of previous work/projects?
• How do you hire developers?
• How do you retain them?
• How do your developers fit into our team?
• What is their level of expertise?
• What programming languages are they fluent in?
• What project management methodologies have they worked in?
• What happens if the scope of the project changes or we want to add more work?
• How does the cost structure overall work?
• Have you helped companies enter new verticals/industries before?
• Have you helped companies pivot?
• What was your experience collaborating in the COVID year?
• What industries do you currently work within?
• Which industries are you looking to work more with?
• What’s the most complicated project you’ve ever undertaken, and how did it go?

If you want more, we have an entire checklist of questions and ideas to run through when evaluating a software development outsourcing partner. You can get it at the bottom of this post.

Meanwhile, this is a very pivotal year for your company and outsourcing might be the best option on the table -- breadth and depth of expertise, ability to pivot, ability to innovate, and value above cost. Consider it, and if interested, let us know.