A web-development outsource partner provides marketing agencies with a transparent, variable, pass-along staffing cost. And also frees the agency from the hairball of staff and project management.
That’s two nice benefits.
Breaking it down in more detail…
01
The agency is only paying wholesale for outsourced development talent, whatever talent it needs, whenever it’s needed… 100 percent productivity.
In a partnership relationship, that can be as low as $39 to $69 per hour. Compare that to the compensation for just one full-time, in-house Sr. Vue.js Developer of $120,000+ (ZipRecruiter, avg. Aug. 2022). NOTE: That $120k is just one discipline, one individual.
Outsource FTE developer, any discipline = $39 to $69 per hour.
—compared to—
One Sr. Vue.js Developer salary = $120,000+
02
The outsource is managing the full project and all the personnel, too. No need for an agency to do staffing and hiring and onboarding (and offboarding, gawd forbid), and all of the other ongoing attention to People Resources.
That is, the partner is right there at the onset, ensuring an in-depth discovery process that results in a definitive, creep-preventing SOW on a complex website project. And then, the ongoing management of what might be a combo of up to 70 different technical experts and developers and business analysts and SMEs… collectively delivering up the success of that very project.
Or maybe it’s more of an ad hoc project where there are simply a variety of smaller tasks that would otherwise be distracting and not profitable for the agency but that must be done. Response forms that have to be fixed or a broken plugin or a slider that isn’t working. An outsource will remove that kind of distraction from the agency, too.
IP…The Lead-up to User Stories
Just one example of how that staff management can pay off is through user stories. But to get there, let’s take a look at a lead-up step first… intellectual property, or IP.
That is, a highly developed outsource probably has its very own IP in place for managing complex, pan-continental processes successfully. That’s a good sign. Instead of it trying to retrofit existing, off-the-shelf digital project tools and job boards into a customized, global service offering, it has developed its own proprietary tools that help do the job better.
Then, as a natural progression of having those types of patented IP tools, all sorts of SOPs are built into the usage of those tools. That means, for them to truly be IP, they must include a sort of “owner’s manual” of how everything works; how each step of a process must be conducted.
And workers have to follow those rules.
Because the care and QC are automatically baked in (staff and project management combined, if you will), the agency and the end-client will ultimately benefit.
That’s Where User Stories Come in
Enter the “user story”, just one example of the hallmark “steps” of quality web-development work.
Imagine that during the course of the complex project, a programmer is working on a tool (or web page) that generates a certain type of report within the site. It could be anything… maybe it’s a report about the status, condition and history of an item in dealer stock, such as a piece of rental equipment.
The developer that is creating the tool that generates that report is going to refer to the “user-story” documentation that is part of the work-process flow… and that asks these types of questions:
What is the report supposed to contain (checklists, pictures, numbers, opinions, facts, etc.)?
How is it to be used, what is its purpose, and how is it to be downloaded or accessed?
Who can see it? Can some users see it in part and others in full?
Can it be edited and how and by whom?
It’s those types of questions. And the developer investigates and defines answers for them. All of this back and forth Q&A gets logged. There’s a date-and-time stamp to all of those exchanges and decisions, and a rationale and thought process that is in writing. It is trackable and accessible and tangible.
Through the user story, the developer fully understands the “Why?” of what is being created and the end product that’s created is better as a result. Then, other parties and future developers have that as a reference, too.
And even though that is part of a much bigger picture as outlined here in this article, it is ultimately staff and project management. How a user story translates to a success story.
All taken care of, all remote, all out of the hair of the agency. Freeing it to focus on the strategy it delivers to the end-client versus the distracting minutiae surrounding it.
