Sometimes it’s hard to decide when it’s time to go outside of your company for resources. In this blog post, we break down when you should keep the work in-house versus when it’s time to hire an agency to pick up the slack.
Reasons to use in-house resources:
- Such a complex or specific business that no one else would really know how to do it. Examples: military, science, etc.
- Where there are serious compliance or security restrictions. If no one else is allowed into your network or code and needs background checks or government compliance this might not be worth looking outside. If you need to be private or achieve some data or standards that general access could compromise then maybe it’s best to solve in-house.
- Where it’s just not that hard! If your job can be kept really simple and you don’t need it to be beautiful, perfect, or doesn’t have a lot of traffic then maybe you can just do it yourself. Finding vendors takes time that could just be spent getting an easy job done.
- When you plan to stay with certain technology for the long haul. If you know you will be sticking with a new system or service it might be worth learning it and making sure you have competent resources in your own office. Perhaps a little training would be a good investment but in the end, it’s best to know how to fish than forever be buying them!
Times when you should hire an agency:
- When everyone in your company is busy with important revenue-generating efforts and taking them off what they are good at has too high of an opportunity cost.
- Where there is too much effort to learn new skills. If your technical resources will have to learn new languages, frameworks, or deeply complex solutions it might be better to spend on experts in that subject matter.
- Where the project is temporary. There is nothing worse for company morale than hiring and firing people. If this is a short job then maybe it’s best to hire an outside agency to execute this project with no string attached.
- Where there is ongoing maintenance, management and monitoring. If applications need attention, updates, testing, and alerting then it might be best to let someone else stand on guard for you and triage issues to your own folks who handle solving the problems. Handling constant updates or changes can be a real-time suck on your technical team.
- Where there is lots of oversight needed. There is a reason every job at 729 has a project manager. To keep to deadlines and make sure all the dogs in the team pull together. If you don’t have the oversight then there will likely be a real waste of developer hours.