If you’re thinking of developing your product, one of the first questions you will be faced with will be whether to hire an outsourced development team or an in-house development team. Before making any decision, it is crucial to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of hiring in-house vs. an outsourced development team. Learning about the differences between the two will give you an idea of what you can expect from both of these options. 

Know the difference

The main difference between outsourcing a team of developers from a software company and hiring a team of developers locally lies in your responsibilities. If you pick the second option, there are several things that you need to keep in mind. Firstly, you will have more duties, such as: 

• managing software developers,
• managing the office,
• hiring additional employees. Scrum masters, an Office Manager, a CFO, an accountant and an HR team.
• Recruiting software developers – which may seem simple, but as you will learn in one of the paragraphs below, if you want to hire skilled developers that won’t resign after a short period of time, you need to do your research and go through a well-prepared recruitment process. 
• Hiring additional employees translates to having much more responsibilities, which in turn means that the business side of your product will be put aside. You’ll spend more time managing your team than actually developing your product. 
• Scaling up and down your team – hiring the developers at the beginning of your project may not be enough. Due to the challenges, ever-changing needs of clients, and many other variables, you’ll probably find yourself in need of scaling your team up or down at various stages of your project.

What can you expect if you hire an outsourced team of developers? 

Least possible cost

You don’t have to worry about modern office management, keeping people motivated, trust-building, effective performance measurement or providing necessary tools for IT Project Management, such as Jira, etc, if you hire an outsourced software development team. This is one of the key reasons why outsourcing software development.

Hiring an in-house team will expose you to many additional costs that will drain your wallet. 

You’ll have to put your mind into researching the market and preparing job offers as well as researching the right tools for your requirement process, finding job portals to use, and finally, finding the right people for your team, and making sure that they’ll stay with you. 

Before doing all of that, however, you’ll have to ask yourself: what can you offer to the developers? You’ll have to make sure that you have an office and tools that meet the needs of your future employees, you’ll have to think of real benefits that you can give to employees and real development opportunities, such as medical care, knowledge base, participation in the conferences, and more. 

With the outsourcing team, you don’t have to invest your time, money and thoughts into all of that. The equipment, the necessary tools, or the mass of other circumstances that accompany the maintenance of employees are no longer your problem. The only thing you need to focus on is creating your product. As you can see, it takes a lot of pressure off you. 

Time to spare

Now, you’re probably already getting the gist of it all. Fulfilling your role as a CEO, maintaining the product, supervising the developers, talking to clients, and at the same time taking care of the office is not a one-man job. Managing the workload like that or hiring a group of people to manage it for you and managing their work instead is, of course, possible, but you have to ask yourself this one simple question: do you want to dedicate so much time to all of those things instead of committing it to your product? It might not seem like a lot right now but managing every single above-mentioned task and keeping your employees satisfied and motivated at the same time might not only take all of your time but also take your mind off what’s important: your product. This is a clear disadvantage of hiring an in-house software development team. 

With an outsourcing development team, administrative tasks, the workplace, coordinating office supplies, managing your team and your office, and all of the other tasks mentioned above, are not your responsibility. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about them. It’s also beneficial for you because when you are sure your software is going in the right direction, you can focus on other aspects of developing your product. The marketing strategy, target group, competition, branding, etc. all need your consideration. Outsourcing will afford you the opportunity to put your mind to it instead of trying to think about million other things, all at the same time. So not only, as was stated in the previous section, hiring an outsourced development team costs less money but also offers you more time. 

Keeping employees motivated

As we’ve already mentioned, one of the challenges of hiring an in-house development team is keeping them motivated and satisfied. One may wonder, why is it so important though? Why do I need to concern myself with the recruitment process? 

It cannot be that hard and time-consuming, right? Well, it all depends on the outcome that you’re looking for. You could go through the recruitment process without putting much thought into it, but that can result in hiring random people that won’t fit in with your organization and won’t stay with you for long. 

A high turnover among employees is never a good thing for your business. Conducting a poorly organized recruitment process puts you to the expense of onboarding new people. 

So, to ensure high-quality work and satisfying results you’ll need to hire talented staff and make sure that they stay with you. The fact that your idea for a SaaS startup is innovative won’t be enough to achieve that. It takes a lot of time and dedication to create a suitable environment that keeps people inspired and motivated. 

You can achieve this with a few things. Firstly, it requires regular talks with employees. Listening to them and their needs may help you keep them happy and a happy employee is a productive employee. For example, it is not so uncommon for people to get bored of performing the same tasks over and over. Changing the tasks, the area they’re working on, projects or even their role may increase their performance at work, but if you don’t devote your time to employees you’ll never realize that it is something that’s needed. 

The other thing that you may do is invest your time in learning about the effect of mindfulness and meditation on your employees. More and more research suggests that mindfulness and meditation can improve creativity and productivity at work, as well as manage stress and anxiety levels. Many companies put money into creating a meditation space at the office. We, at Profil Software, funded a room designed for meditation and mindfulness at our office, and many companies do the same, installing meditation booths or zenbooths at their offices. 

Mental health is even more important now during Covid-19 and in the aftermath of isolation. According to the studies conducted during that time, many people felt discouraged and fatigued when they were forced to stay at home, many lost their motivation to work. Mental health and all of the manners, in which you as an employer can uplift your employees,  is, therefore, something worth looking into. If you don’t know where to start you could always turn to apps designed to guide you through meditation and mindfulness programs, such as Take3Breaths App – guided meditation app. It’s a special app designed for workplace meditation. 

Of course, instead of managing all of that, you could trust an experienced outsourced development team. 

Easy scaling

Expanding or reducing your team is not an issue when you are outsourcing software development teams. You can do so at any given time without the fear of losing money. The process of scaling with an outsourced team is quick – your business is conducted by a well-trained staff that can meet your every expectation. The company will adapt to your needs and provide temporary support whenever it’s needed. Imagine that you’re waiting for another round of funding and you need to scale your team down quickly, but then, sometime later, you have to meet deadlines and therefore, you have to scale it up again. With an in-house development team, it may be a problem. An outsourced one will definitely give you more flexibility in that regard.

What tools should you use?

Not every tool that you can find on the Internet is going to be appropriate for your business/startup, etc. When you’re looking for the right tools for your company to use, you should take into consideration what type of business you’re running and what are its specific needs. 

We are aware of the possibilities of numerous specific tools used for IT Project Management. Software such as Trello, Monday, Microsoft Teams, Asana, and Teamwork have similar functionalities. What distinguishes these tools from one another is their approach to solving a given problem.

Each tool that you choose should correspond with processes that occur in your company. Operating and configuring a tool like, for example, JIRA requires an employee who is well trained in using this tool. Similarly, workflow configuration should be handled by someone who has an understanding of Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban). There are many tools that may help speed up the software development process and you don’t necessarily only need advanced software like JIRA to improve the workflow. Even using such a simple tool as Trello can help you manage your employees’ work. What is crucial is to not dismiss the importance of writing down tasks and communicating with your team. If you want to be successful in managing it, though, you need someone experienced in using them; someone skilled and good command of these tools. 

This is why it is so essential to have regular training on how to use various platforms, as well as to have someone on the team who will be specialized in this and therefore will be able to train others. 

Outsourcing to Poland

Poland is thought to be one of the leading countries in the matter of the development of technology. Many of our developers have already worked on projects of various sizes for multinational companies. We have an easy point of reference in their approach to development, thanks to a large number of meetings, conferences, and activities within the local technology communities that help them develop better products. 

We are experienced in developing software for many industries, starting with Enterprise Software and Shareholder Management Software, through Speech Recognition Software, Route Planning and Optimization Software, Crowdfunding Software, up to Real Estate Software and Healthcare Software. We worked on many different applications, always taking into account very specific requirements and needs of each and every Industry. For instance, as a custom healthcare software development company, Profil Software developed an application with real-time telehealth video calls, an electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR), safe data sharing, online doctor appointment booking, and so on. We’ve also worked on managing and integrating payments for this and other Industries, knowing how important it is in this day and age to have safe payment systems that can be adjusted to the client’s needs. 

Conclusion

As you can see, hiring an outsourced development team instead of the in-house one can be more beneficial for you. It reduces costs, lets you shift your attention to the development of your product, makes scaling easier, and provides you with the help of a professional. If, however, you’d still like to dedicate your time, money and resources to hire in-house developers, you need to be prepared for all of the hard work that comes with it and all of the issues that can arise during the development process. Among other things, it can easily lead to you getting stuck with your project somewhere in the middle and make it difficult for you to scale your team in accordance with your needs. This is why it is so important to ask yourself: Do I really want to dedicate all of my money, time, and resources to hire an in-house team of developers? Will it be profitable in the long run?