Seven Reasons Why We Don’t Outsource Our Development
A skilled, intelligent, and driven development team is hard to come by. From the day we opened our doors in 2005 to today, building our team has been an ongoing process.
Outsourcing might seem like a viable option for many web development companies, but not ours. We simply do not outsource for specific reasons.
In this article, we’ll delve into why we prefer to grow and work with our internal team and how this benefits us and our clients.
At Elemental we’ve been developing websites, web apps, eCommerce stores and platforms for over 18 years now. Our growth has been slow and steady and this is for a good reason, as we only hire developers internally to be part of our team.
The option of outsourcing projects or parts of projects to freelance developers or other smaller development agencies exists. However, this is something that we’ve never been attracted to doing for many reasons.
1. CUSTOM WEB DEVELOPMENT IS OUR CORE COMPETENCY
We specialise in developing custom complex websites and web applications for our clients. It’s not one in a long list of things we do, it’s what we do.
Our clients hire us due to our experience, expertise, processes, and also based on the work we have previously completed.
2. WE VALUE OUR SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES
We’ve worked very hard to introduce and constantly tweak many systems and processes within our business to allow us to work better, and faster to deliver increasingly better projects for our clients. These systems and processes span various aspects from the onboarding of new developers to how we write code, how we do deployments, how we test projects, and how we manage projects.
As a team and as a company, it’s important that we’re all on the same page and aligned with how we work in unison and how we produce projects.
These systems and processes allow us to introduce new developers and get them up to speed quickly so that they are able to start producing code and projects that meet our standards.
Ultimately, putting these measures in place allows us to scale and grow in a structured and quicker way while still maintaining high standards.
3. WE INVEST IN OUR DEVELOPMENT TEAM
It is clear to us that the more trained and skilled our developers are, they will be better equipped to perform their duty.
Before new developers join our company, they go through a stringent hiring process where we test their development ability so that only technically suitable developers can join our team.
To facilitate ongoing growth, we invest in our team to grow their knowledge and technical skill sets. We do this through ongoing training, peer-to-peer code reviews, and through developer meetings where a host of technical development topics are discussed.
4. OUR ENTIRE TEAM IS FULLY ALIGNED
For any web development project to succeed, the success is not purely dependent on the developers, but rather on the performance of the entire team. These teams may consist of designers, developers, product owners/business analysts, QA (Quality Assurance) testers, and project managers.
Having our entire team in-house allows each and every member of the team to understand the vital role that the other team members play. It cements how each role works and what the procedures around the roles are, and how each role contributes to the success of the project.
With the development of custom and complex web applications, there is a huge amount of constant interactions throughout the project and by having team members aligned, we’re able to streamline communication and work optimally to increase our quality and productivity output.
As we house our entire team internally, we are able to control the entire software development process from start to finish, giving us a huge advantage over teams that are outsourced, to deliver successful projects. A major benefit to this is that we’re able to bring on additional resources onto a project and get them familiar with the project quickly so that they’re able to start producing fast, while still consistently delivering work that is according to best practices.
5. INTERNAL KNOWLEDGE AND IP CONSTANTLY GROWS
We’ve been in the custom development game for many years since the early 2000s and over the years, we’ve built up a strong knowledge of various industries. We’ve also worked with and integrated with numerous third-party platforms such as payment gateways, booking engines, messaging tools, and gaming providers to name a few.
Through the development and completion of many projects, we’ve worked with many different types of technologies, coding languages, and development frameworks. This exposure and experience allowed us to grow our internal knowledge and use this to our client’s advantage in the future. This also allows us to share and upskill newer developers who join our team.
We can in some cases reuse existing code and parts of previous projects that have been successfully developed and tested in newer projects. This lets us fast-track processes like integrations.
6. WE VALUE RELATIONSHIPS IMMENSELY
We truly value relationships, and by working closely with an internal team, we’re able to build and nurture deep relationships to get the best out of our team, allowing us to consistently exceed client expectations.
These relationships form the basis of our culture. It makes us stronger as a team on the whole.
On the flip side, we also build very tight-knit relationships with our clients too. We typically act as a tech partner to our clients, helping and guiding them along the journey as the development of their digital products evolves.
To preserve these relationships with our clients and to ensure that we are able to deliver as expected, we maintain that having an internal development team allows us to have better control of the development process. By producing work that meets and exceeds our client’s expectations, we foster these relationships with our clients and entrench ourselves in their business.
7. FREELANCE DEVELOPERS DON’T MEET OUR STANDARDS
In our experience, we’ve shied away from using outsourced development teams and freelance developers. We took on several projects in the past where clients have left astray with poorly developed projects because they trusted a freelancer or unskilled development team.
With our in-house team, we have control over all aspects and areas of development, from code quality, testing, communication, and delivery perspective, hence why our clients know that they can expect top-tier web development from us without fail.
We have found that some freelancers and external developers do not uphold the standard of work that we produce and expect. To uphold our standard of work, we do not consider developers who produce poor-quality work and cut corners.
All of our developers, designers, and QA testers report to a project manager respective to their project. Freelancers and external developers work on their own time. This conflicts with the meticulously planned structure, processes and quality way of coding we use to ensure that we meet our client deadlines.
Our developers work according to a predefined standard of coding, and freelancers or external developers may not adhere to this standard.
Our senior developers have honed their skills in custom web development. They play an important role in mentoring and coaching newer developers to get their skills up to par in no time. At Elemental, we foster a culture of growth and coaching.
We value and implement our processes at all times to accelerate the pace in which our new developers learn new and beneficial skills. Here, we have a collective goal we strive towards and systems in place to reach our goal.
We are not confident that we can achieve the levels of success and all of the benefits listed above with developers who are not on our team.
It’s a decision we stand by and that benefits our team and our clients. It’s not to say that outsourcing can’t work but for us, it’s not a viable option.
WRAPPING UP
At Elemental, some of our developers have been a part of our team for over a decade. We are committed to diligently training our team to reach outstanding collective success with every project we take on.
We are excited to come into the office. We know that our expert team of developers honed their skills to execute projects exactly how our clients want them.
We’ve worked hard to build our team, our processes, and our internal knowledge bases and we will continue to do so in order to deliver stellar custom web development projects.
Don’t let your ideas go to waste on an inexperienced team. Get in touch with us today for all of your web development needs! You can reach us via email here.
