Outsource Software Development or Hire a Software Professional?

In today’s globalization era, many companies strive to enhance their IT capabilities by upgrading IT facilities and going for new Software Development. The dilemma in many corporate IT heads is whether to outsource the software development work to a software development company or to appoint a software professional in their payroll. There are merits as well as demerits in both the options. Let us discuss them in detail in the articles.

Hiring software professionals internally might initially sound a cheaper option. But, in the long run this might prove to be expensive and jack up the project cost. This is because the company may incur many hidden expenses in terms of responsibilities, risks, and time consumption. In the first place let us discuss the employee wage. A good software developer costs not less then $70000 a year depending on his skill sets and domain experience. As the whole software development process depends solely on this person, companies can not afford to go for a cheaper software professional with less skill sets. Many developers prefer minimum six month’s contract and that will lead the organization to commit $ 35,000 per position. In case if he is a full timer, then he may seek other benefits such as retirement, insurance, etc, thus increasing the overall IT budget.

Besides this the hiring process itself is a challenging one. Identifying the right person for the job is a daunting task for an IT Manager. To achieve this, he has to interview as many people as possible and put them under rigorous testing procedures. This may be time consuming and eat into project schedule. In IT industry, personality may not be the sole criteria for finding a right skill set. Sometimes candidates with good potentials may not express themselves in words. Next is the induction process. The candidate may have good skill sets and experience, but he needs to be accustomed to the environment, before putting himself in to custom software development.

The other risks involve employee attritions. As there are plenty of openings for software developers the attrition rate is very high. After undergoing all processes such as recruiting, training and induction, if the developer quits during the software development period, the company goes back to squire one. Unless there is a backup, all the processes have to be started once again. This not only affects the project schedule, but also jacks up the project cost.

On the other hand if the organization hires a software development company or an IT consulting company for the job, they will overcome all these shortfalls. A software development company always recruits the best people in the industry by paying hefty package. Professional software development companies and IT consulting companies give the advantage of experts working on your project. These experts will not only translate your business process into custom software development, but also provide useful suggestions in improving them. As these companies are professionally managed they execute the projects in time and without escalating the budget be it any web application development or ecommerce solution.
However, before selecting the right software development company or IT consulting company for the custom software development the organization has to pay attention to few points. They should make sure that the company engages the best talents with required skill sets. They also need to have solid experience in executing similar projects in peers. The very important consideration is that the software development company understands the business processes thoroughly before starting custom software development.
If these criteria’s are met then the software development companies and IT consulting companies can be ideal allies for companies IT endeavour.