Never Outsource, Only Partner

Outsourcing has been around for decades, but real partnering is the new way of doing business. Let’s say you’re a gaming studio, and you’re against a deadline for a new release, and now all of a sudden your behind and your in-house resources are pushed to the max. You scramble to find additional Unity or Mobility resources; you scream at HR all the while the clock is ticking, and all eyes are on you and your team to deliver. If you had an “on-demand” partner relationship with a software engineering company, you would just pick up the phone and yell “HELP.”

But how do you find and vet the right company? Can you trust them with your source-code? Do you go with the large impersonal mega-outsourcing companies who just add bodies from all over the world and hope for the best or do your research and find the right company with the right mix of software expertise and understanding of your vertical market? You may think the code is just code, but when you are dealing with “user experiences” meaning your customers, you want a team of experts that can add value to your organization not just lines of code. It is what I like to call “thinking software development,” a collaborative partnership where you get the technical power that delivers software development in the cloud and also provides feedback to your organization that betters your product or service.

I have worked with many startups and enterprise organizations across multiple markets both B2B and B2C over the years and what remains constant is the pressure to deliver and deliver on time. This applies to fintech, ad tech, e-commerce, gaming, enterprise organizations; it’s all the same. So look at partnering with a software engineering company that understands your business and has a willingness to go that extra mile to become a logical extension of your organization.

Here is are a few more items that you can add to your software development checklist:

• Find a company that has experience in your market and apparently, understands your product and service.
• Research and talk to customers.
• Interview the CEO and departmental technical team leaders.
• Make sure they expertly speak and understand English as this is essential to effective communications and in understanding your needs.
• Only work with a company that lets you get the paperwork out of the way first, sign a non-commitment Master Service Agreement (MSA) that has all the working rules established upfront, then just issue Statement Of Work (SOW) requests in an on-demand fashion.
• Partner with a company that can quickly assemble a tactics team in less than 24 hours of your SOW request and makes sure you make that requirement from your MSA agreement.
• Always demand a source-code and evaluation release agreement and have your legal folks review it.
• If your project is a large one you may want to consider using a company that offers a Surety Bond. A Surety Bond is a risk transfer mechanism where the surety company assures that your software development partner will perform to contract specifications.

The bottom line here is to understand all the nuances of finding the right software development and software engineering partner and to make sure you have done all your homework.