To Outsource or Not to Outsource It Specialists?

Running a business and staying afloat requires smart decisions, especially when it comes to software and IT. If you lack IT resources, you have two options: to hire permanent IT specialists or to outsource them. Both approaches have their pros and cons. Let’s compare them to find the best solution for your business, or let’s discover an entirely new one that may be better.

Hiring IT specialists on a permanent basis always gives you greater control over the project. You can easily manage the team, keep your employees motivated and measure their efficiency. The communication within the team is smoother – everyone is on-site, which makes it easier to discuss daily tasks and solve problems. This approach also has one great advantage: you need to worry less about data security and the threat of crucial information leaks.

Unfortunately hiring employees permanently always means higher costs and lower flexibility. You have to pay regular salaries regardless of the number of actual tasks. Ramp-ups and ramp-downs can be time-consuming and costly. There is also the costs for office space, maintenance of the equipment, and employee benefits. Besides, recruitment in the IT industry nowadays is expensive and time-consuming. This can delay projects, especially when you’re looking for rare tech stacks. Furthermore, constant rotation in IT is not surprising, and may result in additional recruitment processes, costs, and delays.

Scalability and flexibility are often keys to business success. When you want to create a new product or improve the existing one, you don’t have to hire new employees. You can extend your IT capacity and reduce it after the project is done. Outsourcing developers may be the right solution to achieving your business goals without overdoing it with costs.

Let’s imagine that you need to upgrade your product, and to do so, you need 5 front-end developers for 2-3 months. If you outsource it, you’ll only pay for the work done during the duration of the project. There’s no need to worry about additional costs like recruitment, insurance, benefits, maintenance, etc. When the project ends, you won’t stress about what you should do with the team for whom you don’t have any new assignment. In this approach, you pay only for the missing technical skills for a certain period of time. Additionally, when you outsource your IT team and projects, you have more time to focus on your business.

One could say that outsourcing means losing control over the projects and leaving yourself open to communication problems, which may cause additional costs and even further delays. This threat can easily be mitigated. Excellent and modern outsourcing companies work in a delivery management model. Delivery managers are responsible for team motivation and engagement. They act as a conduit between the client and IT specialists when exchanging information. You can feel assured that if any communication issue occurs, it will be quickly solved by your dedicated delivery manager.

This may surprise you, but today you don’t need to choose between hiring on a permanent basis or outsourcing. There is an alternative way to scale up and empower your IT, and its name is hybrid IT outsourcing.

In this third approach, you gain all the benefits of two previous options.

If you decide to work in a hybrid IT outsourcing model, you will have at least one developer from the external team at your office working as a bridge, connecting your company with the remote team members. This solution can assure you that within the project teams, you will have excellent communication and full control over the project.

Furthermore, working in hybrid IT outsourcing means that you don’t hire anyone permanently and you can forget about additional costs like insurance, benefits or office and equipment maintenance. You simply scale up your IT capacity when needed and scale it down when the project ends.

This approach may be the best option for those companies who want to have full control over their IT projects and want to stay flexible at the same time.