A lot of companies find that competitive advantage comes with cutting costs and increasing speed to market. And that often works except if they’re launching a new web application development project. This brings a new set of challenges, especially since the first reaction is to see who’s on staff who could do it.
Throwing additional internal resources toward an IT project might not give you the competitive advantage you’re looking for. In fact, it could very well slow you down. The first potential impact is overextending staff by pulling them onto yet another project and moving their focus away from important, business critical tasks they were hired to do in the first place. Next, lack of expertise can become a roadblock. This can be costly when a project slows down due to errors or delays needed by staff to ramp up and learn something new.
Another solution to consider is outsourcing because it can provide the flexibility and scalability that you need to innovate and get to market faster. Companies such as Basecamp, Squawker and Github, were created with outsourced development. Why? It’s smarter.
The benefits of outsourcing are numerous. Let’s take application development as an example:
1. Experience – you’ll get the expertise you need, when you need it. Outsourcing means your development will be done by professionals who live and breathe development and are constantly learning and applying the latest IT trends to projects
2. Scalability – outsourcing allows you to rapidly scale up or down your development needs without the expense and long-term commitment of hiring additional full-time staff or overextending existing IT staff.
3. Efficiency – a team that is 100% focused on your IT project will increase your speed to market, getting the job done without spending unnecessary time and money on the development phase.
4. Reduced costs – increased efficiencies alone will reduce development costs but you’ll also reduce overhead costs and pay for the services you use, allowing you to save money during periods of low activity.
The next time you’re faced with a new IT project with limited resources, you could save time and money by rethinking the reaction to simply throw more bodies at it and consider outsourcing instead.
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