Switching to Outsourced Software Development for Travel and Hospitality

The project development does not begin with signing a contract but with a choice of cooperation model. This model should base on various factors: clients needs, type of the project, work approach.

 Earlier, we described the types of working with the development team along with approaches and patterns used in each type. Now we will consider all the pros, cons, and nuances of each style.

Almost every company is questioning if it should go to outsourcing software development. When it is time to decide, business owners consider a lot of factors such as the speed of solving emerging issues, monitoring of work progress, qualifications of employees, managing an outsource team, and others. As a result, many business owners reject the idea of outsourcing because they don’t know how to manage an outsourced team. In practice, outsourced teams are suitably prepared for remote work and communication between all the team members to ensure that all the operations run smoothly, and all the employees are productive. That is why starting working with an outsourced team is now “painless” and easier.

When deciding on switching to IT outsourcing, it is necessary to analyze the current situation and determine how well the in-house team meets the existing requirements of your organization and the characteristics and features of outsourced work.

IT Outsourcing: who benefits from it the most?

• Businesses that have their IT departments which are overloaded, where the specialists aren’t able to cope with all the tasks. In this case, outsourcing will be the best solution to unload the in-house team and solve urgent tasks. 
• Companies that do not need full-time developers but require improvements and development of internal systems or implementation from scratch (of their property management system, for instance). In this case, hiring an outsourced team is more profitable than hiring in-house staff.

Advantages of outsourcing

To eliminate the hesitation about outsourced software development, sometimes it’s just enough to look at some considerable advantages and data statistics.

1. Easy monitoring of the work progress

Many people do not hire outsourced employees for development due to a lack of experience managing outsourced teams. They are afraid to waste and tasks will not reach desired progress. Monitoring the work of outsourced employees is even easier than in-house ones. Here are three of the most popular ways of managing outsourcing teams: 

• If you have the system for setting tasks, then a specialist connects to it, sets the hours spent on the task, and changes the status of tasks. With the such system it is easy to manage an outsource team;
• If you don’t have such a system then a developer can access the outsourcing accounting system (for instance, JIRA, ASANA, etc.), where employees daily report what they have done and how much time they have spent;
• In case you do not want or there is no opportunity to connect to any of the systems and monitor the work every day, then you can ask a developer to fill in a detailed report in Excel weekly or monthly. This report will contain the info about the hours spent on each task, with explanations of the scope of work.

2. Specialists are constantly growing professionally but not at your expense

As a rule, employers pay for courses or workshops of their in-house IT specialists, and the courses are usually not very cheap. When switching to an outsourced software development team, you don’t have to spend money on the development of outsourced employees since companies that provide outsourcing services are interested in the professionalism of their developers. 

It is common practice in the IT sphere that every 6 months, a leader discusses a professional development plan with each specialist. Often, employees specify what is now in demand and what configurations need to be improved to solve customer problems faster.

3. The outsourcer company monitors the quality of services, collects feedback, and quickly responds to it

Approximately 2 days after a specialist joins the project, the specialist’s manager contacts the client and clarifies whether there are any comments or suggestions on the work. If there are any difficulties, workers immediately discuss them and solve the problems. Such discussions management can conduct every two weeks. Developers are also interested in bettering their work, and they regularly ask the customer whether he is satisfied with them and what can be improved. 

4. Outsourcing specialists work more efficiently 

In companies, managers do not always analyze the effectiveness of full-time employees. If a specialist solves problems for a long time or does nothing for several hours a day, he is still getting paid. Working with an outsourced team for costs is more transparent – the customer sees what he spends on the budget. At the end of the month, the client receives a financial report. In this report, the client sees the cost of each task and the hours spent on each task.

5. Outsourcing specialists solve complex tasks faster

Every day outsourcing programmers face numerous diverse tasks, so they have hands-on experience in solving tasks fastly and finding the right approach to tasks, unlike the person who has been working in one place for a long time. Outsourcing specialists can cope with a daunting task faster, even if they have never encountered it. If it is difficult for them to solve the problem, they can ask for help from their tech leads.

6. Outsourcers finish urgent tasks and even help find a new developer for you

Outsourcing will become a lifesaver when a full-time developer quits and there is no one to replace him. The search for a new employee and his adaptation will take about 3 months if approached with proper care. Work will not stand still if you use the services of an outsourcer.

All in all, switching to outsourced software development allows you to solve problems without spending money on the maintenance of IT professionals.

How do ASD developers work?

We prefer not to be called an outsourcing company since we give our clients not just our “hours” – we provide them with ideas and improvements thanks to our experience, expertise, and skills in business automation. We help businesses improve their solutions for the Travel and Hospitality industry by deploying innovations, tools, and perspective features. We’re not just about the “leasing”, we’re about the optimization and modern tech solutions. That’s why we choose the way of working along with the client on each stage of the software development process, starting from analysis and up to project deployment and its further maintenance and support.  Contact us if you would go with such a cooperation model.