With the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, and the productivity boost it brought on with it, people started to realize the importance of this technology. It managed to move work from the physical realm into the abstract one. Spreadsheets, pictures, presentations, and text in their physical form became obsolete and were replaced by files stored inside a big beige noisy box.
All the people who managed to get their hands on a computer realized it’s huge potential. Spreadsheets were easily corrected without the need of redoing calculations for every small mistake made. Any typo in a written text could be easily fixed with a couple of button presses and presentations took a couple of minutes to make rather than a couple of hours. The personal computer revolutionized the way knowledge workers approached their work.
It didn’t take long until the need for more information access started to become apparent. Thus, in the 1970s a bunch of scientists foresaw the opportunity and gathered themselves around in order to find a solution. They came up with an invention that let multiple computers communicate with each other, and they named it the ARPANET.
It was the first wide-area network with data transfer capabilities and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. The ARPANET became the technical foundation to what was later called the Internet.
With the increased adaptation of the internet in the 1990s, people were not only limited to the information stored on their computer. It helped them break the confines of their PCs and gave them the ability to access any piece of information available on any computer in the world. It opened the gates to a new reality, one that existed only in people’s imagination.
Companies saw the huge opportunity and started to rethink their ways of doing business. Restaurants began to take delivery-orders on the internet, shops began selling their products online and the concept of payment was no longer limited to a person physically swiping their card or giving cash.
The internet continued to grow throughout the 2000s, a period in which a lot of enterprises realized the importance of moving their businesses online. Some of them, took the opportunity and started building web-applications that increased their flexibility and helped them grow their market reach. While others, built business on top of their newly created technical solutions.
Although, a lot of companies, especially outside of the US, were hesitant to take such leaps forward. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic hit that those businesses realized the importance of digitalization and modernizing their internal processes. The impact of a world halting its activities for 2 whole months, during which most of our day-to-day activities moved from the physical spaces to the online, helped people understand the importance of having a flexible solution.
Thus, the rush for building software solutions started to gain momentum. Companies found ways to digitize their services and processes and wanted to build a solution as soon as possible, but they found themselves stuck in an intersection not knowing which turn to take. To build an internal team to help develop their software solution or hire an external team that will help them bring their vision to life?
Depending on the context, any of the aforementioned solutions could be plausible. Though managing your own internal software development team, especially if you’re not a tech company at heart could be a daunting, resource intensive approach to take. To find out why, let’s dive deep into the intricacies of putting together a productive software development team.
The challenges of building an Internal Software Team
Creating a development team to help you bring your idea to life can be brutally difficult. The process is fraught with challenges, from hiring competent team members to keeping them motivated to mitigating a lack of skill in certain areas in your team’s ability. Let’s dive deep and understand why these challenges do appear in the process.
Finding the right talent
In order to build a solid application that shifts your company processes into the digital realm one would have to overcome the challenges of hiring exceptional people in the industry. The success of what is being built hinges on having talented developers. But finding those top performers sometimes feels like climbing a steep mountain only with a pair of sneakers and jeans.
Unlike other industries, the tech industry is facing a large labor market shortage. In 2020, in the United State alone, around 40 million jobs went unfulfilled with a study expecting the number to shoot to 85.2 million until the end of the decade.
And that’s not all, the process of hiring developers is a time-consuming, resource-intensive and at points nerve-racking process. According to one study, it takes around 66 days to find a hire for a position, that’s 50% more than hiring for any other position!
Even if you manage to hire a developer, there is not guarantee that the developer will remain in the company. A survey conducted in September of 2021 found out that 72% of people were willing to resign in the first 12 months of their employment. So, an investment in resources to offer new hires the best working experience is necessary in order to increase the chances of keeping them.
Keeping the team motivated
As discussed in the previous challenge, to keep a team motivated, necessary resources need to be offered to the team members. According to a survey of 1000 employees conducted by Talent LMS and Workable, 62% answered that being offered more training and learning at their jobs is the most important factor for them with regards to remaining in that position.
Providing workers with more opportunities for development and career advancement requires an allocated budget for:
- Finding companies who could offer the trainings
- Paying fees necessary to enroll team members in online courses
- Hiring new team members with expertise in a certain tech areas to train other team members
Thus, an important factor of keeping the team motivated requires a continuous investment to increase your chances of keeping the team members as long as possible, as happy as possible.
Managing Software Development Teams
To achieve a well-functioning team, hiring someone with experience in managing developers is a must. For someone to be considered a good manager, he has to:
- Understand software development lifecycle
- Understand the most common issues that appear during the project development
- Be adaptable to new challenges that may arise
- Understand each team member’s role and the value it brings
Also, it must be considered that developing a new technical solution requires more than software developers, especially if the needed outcome is an exceptional software product.
For instance, any new development initiative requires an experienced project manager that can ensure everybody is on the same page while also knowing how to mitigate issues without drastically impacting the product timeline.
Also, developers may not understand the business well enough and thus the need for people who could act as intermediaries between the businesspeople and the developers will positively impact the project and will help developers focus on what they are best at.
We call those intermediaries Business Analysts, and their job is to understand the business requirements and transpose them in a form that makes it easy for a developer to comprehend, thus avoiding the back and forth that could arise from client-developer communication.
However, hiring competent managers, project managers and business analysts require additional investments resulting in an increase of the overall costs of building an internal development team.
Hiring a software agency
Now that we have an idea of the most prominent challenges that come alongside building an internal software development team, let’s look at why it is sometimes better to hire an external agency to build your solution.
An external software agency will be of immense help when it comes to delegating all the challenges we’ve talked about in the previous section. All the processes regarding hiring developers, managing, and motivating them will be the agency’s responsibility, ridding you of all the administrative hassle and the resources needed to pour in order to build a functional team.
Even so, one might think that the costs incurred when hiring an external agency may seem at first the more expensive option to take but there is a long-term positive impact to it.
One of the most common problems that appear with internal development teams is sustaining the team’s productivity. A lot of companies struggle to find allocations for team members after a project is finalized, which exposes them to the risk of paying and managing unproductive developers.
When working with a development agency, once the work is finalized and the contract is honored, there is no need to pay for the team’s availability, avoiding in the process, the problem of paying unproductive team members which has a positive cost impact in the long run.
Even if technical support is needed for your solution after the go-live, this won’t oblige you to allocate your whole internal team of developers just for the sake of making them productive. With an external software agency, you will have the option of hiring some software professionals to be on demand for a certain number of hours per month which will result in lower development costs and less administrative hassle.
In addition, if at one point during development the technical solution starts to require a type of expertise in a new area, one could either ask the agency if they have it or discuss with another agency that already offers it in their service package without the need of going through the hassle of recruiting new team members.
Ready to tackle these challenges?
Don’t let the challenges of building an internal team hold your journey of digitalization back. We understand the difficulties that can arise in the process of building a successful software team and product, because we’ve faced them ourselves – over a dozen times in multiple projects.
Devista can act as your one-stop shop for overcoming these hurdles. Our team of over 30+ skilled professionals brings a wide range of expertise to the table. We’re here to help you navigate all the obstacles and ensure your project’s success.
Ready to turn your vision into reality? Contact Devista today. We’re eager to collaborate with you!
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