Looking to build an MVP, but lack the technical skills? Or need specific engineering expertise for a project where it doesn’t make sense to hire full-time, or even part-time developers? Outsourcing engineering projects to software consultancy firms can be a convenient solution to many business problems faced by established firms and younger startups. In this post we’ll look at five advantages of using outsourced engineering:

1) Rapid Development Cycle & Turnaround Time

By choosing a development team that is experienced in building on a certain stack, and that works on a consultancy basis full-time, you can guarantee a rapid development cycle with a quick project turnaround. A big benefit of this pace is that it lets outsourced development teams work on new iterations and address feature requests, with project managers ensuring that full project scope is always met.

Working with a team used to agile sprints, adapting to new environments, and understanding client needs has huge advantages. Established software consultancies can leverage extensive procedural experience for rapid diagnosis of issues and swift reactions to client feedback.

2) Flexibility

A huge advantage of outsourcing engineering is that it requires only a short-term commitment. Additionally, experienced consultancies require minimal onboarding, eliminating a lot of the usual red tape that can be involved in new hires. Forget your HR woes! Using out-of-house engineering, staffing headaches rapidly dissolve.

For example, a firm may need Python/Django experience to build out a web application in the short-term. Once the application is built and handover processes are set up by the software consultancy, the firm can ‘tick off’ this project and only hire advanced technological expertise on a per-project basis, which is a great approach for many business models.

3) Expertise

Firms don’t always have the budget to hire the very best senior talent in the technology fields that they require. By working in different industries and tackling projects of varying scope and complexity, an out-of-house consultancy can provide a wealth of industry experience and technical assurance.

Once products have been built, experienced software consultancies can simply set up handover procedures that pass the codebase back to more junior engineers or even non-technical staff to manage, via tried and tested phases.

4) Focus

Hiring an outsourced expert development team allows firms to focus on their core competencies. Sales whiz? Marketing mogul? Focus on that. By specializing in what you do best, you can get the most value out of your investment.

In particular for non-technical founders, focusing on personal areas of expertise while leaving technical strategy to the experts can be a great option, rather than spreading your resources too thin and losing sight of your real areas of business knowledge.

5) Money Saving

Unfortunately, the money saving benefit of outsourced engineering is too often associated with cheap labor that yields a disappointing end-product. Still and all, this can sometimes be the case if you choose the wrong provider. It pays to choose a high-quality consultancy that will sit down with clients in person to develop a deep understanding of project requirements and product purpose.

The money savings delivered by a high-quality, watertight product produced by a dedicated team far outweigh the risks of working with bottom-dollar, inexperienced offshore developers. Attention to detail from the outset will pay dividends by insuring your product against buggy code and avoidable hidden issues that could surface down the line, and require unforecasted spending to fix.

Conclusion

If you lack the in-house experience to develop software applications yourself, hiring outsourced engineering talent from experts is often a perfect solution. Despite the reservations of many executives — concerns over costs, IP, and handover processes — by finding the right consultancy to build your product you can mitigate operational risks while ensuring that you have the full focus of an expert team.

Read How to Succeed With Outsourcing Software Development