Build a Winning Web Development Team. In-house or Outsource?
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced entrepreneur, one thing remains certain. Once you start nourishing the idea of setting up a business, at a certain point in time, you would have to decide between building patiently your in-house staff or outsourcing your work to offshore employees. The other option is hiring IT recruiting agency (read more about pros and cons of IT recruiting agencies). Your decision will depend on your needs, the level of your business, and the target that you want to attain.
It will make much sense if a startup company focuses on building a development strategy and ensure that the employees follow or work in accordance with the development plan established. Since the company is still young, hiring an offshore staff wouldn’t be the ideal option. On the other hand, well-established companies could concentrate on finding new opportunities. More time could be spent on improving development strategies so hiring a dedicated and experienced remote team or outsourcing work would be a reasonable option.
Let’s together, analyse some options below:
Option 1: Building your own team
You will have to take your time to build your own team by starting with a single specialist, then increase the number of employees and share roles or responsibilities for all operational activities over time.
What are the benefits?
- Your team devotes all of their time to your web development services depending on your work schedule.
- The work for you only, hence focus their attention on your work. Since they work in one office, you have total control over their workflow, you know what is going on and you can streamline things if necessary.
- You have clear levers of influence on everyone, independently setting the level of wages and determining non-financial motivation – that is, you create the “rules of the game” and the organizational culture of the company.
Although building a team is beneficial for startups, it has some disadvantages.
The Disadvantages of inhouse web development team:
You might not know how to choose a good specialist (marketing specialist/web developer/business analyst/UX design, etc.), how to set tasks for your departments, how to control and gauge the effectiveness of work produced. In some cases, you could spend more than half a year or more, training your team.
It’s obvious that in-house development is much more expensive than cooperating with a outsource team. You need to pay for many expenses like rent, taxes, software, hardware, and more. In fact, there are some additional expenses like training for employees, sick days, percks and benefits. See how much does an employee actually cost
Option 2: Giving part of the work to outsource web specialists or outstaff to design work.
Here, you will just create your workforce by inviting outsource web development team to your project.
Benefits:
You can “connect” and “turn off” when necessary.
Disadvantages:
Difficult to control;
You have no guarantee that your desired goal will be attained and that your project will be complete before the deadline.
Option 3: Outsourcing
You have to find a reliable partner and outsource your part of your work to them on a regular basis.
Benefits:
- No need to spend time selecting a the right team, they have already thought of that and collected a pool of specialists (by the way, on average, in order to find a person for the executive position, on average business they spend from 1 to 3 months, then another 1.5 months to adapt and about 6 more months to form a team);
- The team is ready, they value their reputation, therefore, they are interested in achieving the best possible result;
- There is a history of achievements of this particular team; it does not take time for them to demonstrate cohesion;
- The contract can be terminated at almost any time, which reduces the risks on the part of the client;
- The cost is lower than that of the in-house team.
Disadvantages:
A team on constant communication, but remotely.
Also you might need a project manager who helps to handle cultural differences.
The list is not exhaustive, and in each of the options you can find an infinite number of “pros” and “cons”. When choosing any of them, it is very important to once again measure their real needs and goals, and also try not to overestimate their expectations, because even the best teams in the world also make mistakes.
The main thing is not the presence of errors, but how the team recognizes and solves them. Admit the possibility of the influence of the “human factor” and keep in reserve the plans “A”, “B” and “C”.
To sum up, well developed companies or experienced entrepreneurs will even do better if they outsource their extra projects to other reliable companies. However, developing businesses should rather emphasize building a solid development plan and ensure that their in-house employee fully observes the development strategy developed.
