Guide to Outsource Web Development Project. One just cannot do without an online presence these days. So if you are planning to create a website for your set up or revamp the existing one, you will stumble upon the fact that you need to do something about your web development project. You do have many options to do this.
Unless you have some in-house technical support team or find a reliable agency for the job, it is a good idea to consider outsourcing your web development project. The pros of this ensure that that you can get the job done at a very reasonable price than getting it done through an agency. Sometimes even web developing agencies of high repute are found to outsource their assignments to countries where skills are available at a cheaper rate.
These things, however remain undisclosed to clients. Also, if you have an in-house team you have to consider the opportunity cost of the efforts of your team members, who could have been working on some other project to enhance your venture. Also, there tends to be a drag effect when such things are taken up independently. Self-managed projects can get long drawn because there is a sense of autonomous control and deadlines can be flexed.
However, one cannot deny that there can be risks while outsourcing a web development project. There are chances that you can get duped by fake credentials of self-proclaimed web developers and the risk is higher if you personally lack the technical expertise to assess the genuineness. Nevertheless, achieving a budgeted, good quality service is very much possible if you are careful as well as optimistic. Following are some easy ways to get your job done with least chances of glitches:
The first thing to keep in mind while planning to outsource a web development project is that you should focus on an arrangement to make the affair as smooth as possible. This means that you need someone who can monitor the project and achieve all the goals on time to meet the deadline. This is especially required if you don’t have technical knowledge about web development.
For most without technical aptitude, web designing and web development mean almost the same thing when actually it is not. It is important to place a person with technical knowledge to supervise the project. Yes, it will cost you a bit more if you have to hire someone for the job. However, if your outsourced project gets messed up without proper monitoring it will cost you more dearly.
Nothing can get worse for your web development project if you pay for outsourcing your work to an incompetent developer. Always verify the standards and the credentials of a web developer. There are several ways of doing this other than naively believing the web developer’s claims and credentials on face value.
See for reviews from their previous clients. Make an attempt to contact these clients to find out if they truly recommend the web developer’s services. You can also think of devising a program coding test. This can easily help you to weed out sub-standard talent. You can conduct an online hiring session to test and evaluate the web developer. Basing on the live performance, it won’t take you long to decide for a genuine web developer.
Don’t make the mistake of shaking off your responsibility once you have your project manager and web developer in place. You might think that once these guys are in place you can take a chill pill while they churn out your perfect website effortlessly. Your active involvement is needed to ensure the final product is exactly what you wanted or turns out to be even better.
Talk with your project manager about your expectations. Learn the basic technical know-how of web development or at least have an idea of how things work in the process. Set up the key steps of the project which you would hand over to the web developer. This will help you to assess the work better basing upon the successful completion of the fundamental steps.
It is important that you determine a price for your project based on the volume of the work to be done. You can take the advice of your business allies who have hired web developers for a similar job. Your price quote should complement your budget while being at par with market standards to ensure quality service.
In web development projects’ outsourcing there exists a practice of payment based upon a rate per hour. However, you can choose a total price for the entire project instead of making payments for hourly work. This can be economic for you and also reasonable, since you should be paying for the work that is done and not how many hours spent to do it.
It is always a good idea to maintain tight deadlines to prevent delay, but it should not be unrealistic. While it is not appropriate to remain aloof from the running project as you have very little technical knowledge, it is also advisable that you don’t turn into a control freak. Once you have chalked out the key steps of the project with the project manager, let the manager set up reasonable deadlines for achieving each of them.
The biggest advantage of having different milestone deadlines instead of an ultimate deadline is that, there is a greater efficiency in completing the project on time. Short-term goals are easier to achieve than making haste to get an enormous volume of a job done within a single deadline. It also makes it easy to evaluate, modify and keep track of the work progress.
While going through the above, it may appear that you have to actually do a lot to make it easy. The truth is while having an organised approach; the whole process becomes a lot easier and efficient.