How To Choose an Outsourced Software Development Partner

When any business needs to accomplish some tasks out of its professional domain, it usually refers to third-party expertise. This practice ensures the high quality of the provided services and results in quick business growth and enhanced competitiveness in its industry niche. In that regard, outsourcing IT needs is the most popular service sought by small and large businesses.

IT outsourcing allows to significantly cut down expenses and receive professional IT support from app development to staff augmentation without greatly expanding an in-house IT team.

There are a myriad of IT outsourcing companies that offer various services with different engagement schemes. But how to find a reliable IT partner who could provide high quality for an affordable price? In this article, we’ll share some valuable tips on how to choose the right software partner for you.

Why Look For A Software Partner?

First of all, you should realize why you are looking for an IT partner. There can be several reasons to outsource IT activities:

• building a new business application;
• enhancing an existing application;
• adding some expertise to your business team.

If you need a software development partner for creating a new digital solution then you should clarify the type of application you want to build – mobile, web, or desktop. Then you have to determine the type of activities you want your IT outsourcing company to provide such as handling front-end or back-end development or both, QA, DevOps services and others. Or, maybe, you’d prefer to hand over an entire development project to your application development partner and opt for full-cycle app development.

You can also enhance the existing software product or solution you already have. For example, if you have an outdated mobile app, your mobile development partner could add lacking features or cutting-edge functionalities to your digital solution. It could be rebuilding your mobile app into a cross-platform solution, updating the app’s design, adding AI-chatbots, Blockchain, IoT, and other valuable enhancements.

Finally, you may consider improving your in-house IT team performance by adding some narrow expertise from your IT outsourcing partner. The outsourcing team you hire can help your in-house team develop a particular functionality in your app or handle some operations while your team members are absent from work or concentrate on more business-critical tasks.

Conduct Thorough Research

As you’ve determined your IT outsourcing goals, it’s time to search for the IT company that would suit best your business needs. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to do and you need to conduct thorough research.When looking for their IT partners many companies make the same typical mistake. They rely only on Google search results. However, Google will show you only its top results but it won’t provide you with the answers relevant to your project. It doesn’t mean that the companies you’ll see will be the right IT partners for you. For this, you need to perform a bit deeper investigation.

Check out the reviews for the companies you’ve found. You can read testimonials on their sites, rating platforms like Clutch or professional sites for developers like Upwork, Quora, etc. Clutch is a particularly useful site for those who look for reliable IT outsourcing partners. This platform provides its users with objective reviews on each IT outsourcing company and insights on their working style.

Check References

If you already have a shortlist of potential IT outsourcing partners, another useful step is to ask for client references.

References are authentic feedback from the current and previous partners of the IT companies you’re investigating about. They can shed some light on how well the companies are organized, which services and products they’ve worked with, how they arrange communication with their clients, and many other valuable points.

You can get references on your potential IT partners by asking them for the contacts of their current or previous clients and write or call them directly. Before contacting them you could formulate the questions you’d like to ask. This way, you’ll get detailed responses and better understand how the IT outsourcing companies organize their work.

Assess to Relevant Expertise

When searching for an IT outsourcing long-term partner, you should make sure that it can build the solution that would meet all your business needs. Besides that, your potential partner should have appropriate expertise in the niche you are operating in, f.e. logistics, healthcare, banking or e-commerce, etc.

As a result, the software company you choose should possess excellent development and business niche skills. This way, you’ll ensure that your long-term partnership will be stable and fruitful.

Explore Case Studies

Another effective step to investigate the potential IT partners is to explore their portfolio and the case studies or show cases they have.

Case studies will show you how the selected IT partners have handled various challenges they met when developing customer products and solutions. They mention the technologies and tools the developers effectively utilized, which tests they conducted to ensure that their apps work smoothly, and how all these have added to create outstanding user experiences.

Do Not Choose the Cheapest Options

Although a cost-saving approach is a reliable strategy for business development, it doesn’t work when it comes to choosing your future IT outsourcing partner. In most cases, those companies that position themselves as the cheapest, tend to lack tech experience and provide poor quality.

IT services can’t be cheap as software development services are quite complex. It takes 5 years of studying for a software developer just to start working in an IT company and 2-3 years more to become a mid-level specialist. Moreover, effective software development requires a well-organized development infrastructure that includes expensive cutting-edge technologies. All these aspects make software development a costly service.

At the same time, finding the most expensive software development company doesn’t guarantee high product quality either. There are a number of viable ways of cutting down on the development costs. One of them is to become a partner with an IT outsourcing company in the medium-price segment in the international software development market.

Conclusion

Finding a reliable software development partner can be a challenging task. For this, companies have to perform deep research on the IT companies they find and ensure that they meet their business requirements.

Here is a quick IT outsourcing checklist that can help you to choose the IT company that can fulfill your project requirements and build the solution that would enhance your customers’ experiences:

• determine why you’re searching for a software partner,
• conduct deep research on the potential IT partners;
• check the chosen IT company’s testimonials and case studies;
• ensure that the IT company can provide excellent development and business expertise;
• search for the companies in the medium-price segment.