Many experts these days are saying that outsourcing is the way of the future. You might be asking yourself, well, what is outsourcing exactly, what’s so good about it? And why should I outsource mobile app development, when I could try to do it myself?
Well, in this article, we’ll be taking a good look at outsourcing and its many benefits (as well as some of the downsides!).
Since the app/website development industry is ever-growing, we’ll be using the outsourcing of mobile app development as a point of reference throughout this article, but what we say stands for outsourcing other types of projects as well.
The Benefits of Outsourcing
When you see that something is as popular as outsourcing, you have to assume there’s a good reason behind it. So what is driving so many people around the world to assign work to external teams, sometimes even ones located on the other side of the world?
1. Lower costs
There’s no easy way about it, one of the biggest reasons companies outsource their projects is the search for cheaper rates. But in the case of outsourcing, lower fees don’t actually imply lower work quality.
When outsourcing a project, you’re not bound by geographical constraints, as you would be if you were looking to hire an in-house team. And you can use these geographical differences to your advantage. You can hire a team of experts, who’s just as qualified as your in-house team (and sometimes, even more so), from a country, where the living costs and average rates are lower than in your area.
2. Pay per project
With an in-house team, you face one of the main downsides of practically any employer-employee contract – paying them for a whole year, rather than for the projects they’re actually working on. With outsourcing, you get to pay per project and save money.
3. Less stress
With an in-house team, hiring and training skilled developers are responsibilities you have to deal with. You also have to take care of any management problems that arise. On the other hand, outsourcing places all that responsibility on the vendor’s end of the deal. They train, manage, and assign, massively freeing up your schedule.
4. Varied area of expertise
Yes, you might have the best of the best on your in-house team of developers, and that’s great. But chances are, they’re not going to be the best at everything. Different projects require different areas of expertise, and by outsourcing, you can get an expert in any given field to work on a specific project, and then for the next one, you get to hire a different expert in a different field, and so on.
What about the downsides?
Yes, outsourcing development (or any task) has its cons, as well. Communication can be made difficult by language barriers and mentality differences, making it harder to get what you want. Another thing to worry about is reliability – it’s easy to get duped when outsourcing a project, so you’ll need to do some thorough research before assigning any task. Lastly, outsourcing can be risky because the hired professionals may lack the involvement that an in-house team would have.
That being said, outsourcing can be a hugely profitable deal for you and your company, and you should weigh both sides of the argument well before making a choice!
