It is natural that most companies want to reduce spend on software development, but experience tells us that you get what you pay for. The early 2000’s heralded a new era of offshoring in the IT industry. Business leaders looking to cut costs sent their development work to countries with cheaper labour costs.
In these early days of offshoring it was seen as a silver bullet. The impression was that you could just offshore everything and instantly cut costs. Unfortunately, the simplistic idea that you can just fire all your onshore developers and replace them with offshore developers for half the price turns out to not be so simple!
Software development is a highly skilled profession and it takes years to find the right people and build up knowledge in your teams, so replacing a team of skilled developers with a team of varying skilled developers in a remote location can lead to disaster if not managed properly.
Over time, business leaders realised that despite the hourly rate going down, the overall costs went up, with quality and turnaround taking a major hit as well. At the same time, the offshore skills base grew so their hourly rates also rose, meaning the cost savings weren’t the same. Eventually, many businesses reversed their decision to offshore due to the difficulties it introduced.
However, the reality is that offshoring can work, and can deliver cost savings and other benefits if it is managed properly. At PDS Code our strategy involves a hybrid onshore/offshore model where we spread the development effort for each project across an onshore and a trusted offshore team. This gives us the ability to be cost effective, while at the same time not compromising on quality.
Our customers have the onshore resources (who are fully involved in the projects) to liaise with, but will also have cost savings coming from the fully managed offshore team. One of the less obvious benefits to this strategy is that we get round the clock cover – so when deadlines are tight code can be developed while you sleep!
Contact us today to discuss the various options we have on offer to help your development projects.