In-House, Augment, or Outsource: What’s Best for Growing Your Business

When I was a kid, one of the two hinges broke off of my toilet seat.

As any inquisitive person would, I checked to see if I could fix it. Though I used all my knowledge of Legos and basic hardware, I quickly realized I was incapable of turning my now multi-directional toilet seat back to its original design.

So, I asked my dad for help. I knew what was wrong, had an educated guess on how to fix it, but needed some outside help to get the job done. Together, we put our best effort into the job. Let’s just say the results were dicey and included duct tape.

Eventually, the real expert in our family (my mother) intervened and called the plumber. I’ll never forget the joy I felt coming home from school one day to a non-duct taped, fully functioning toilet seat!

Fast forward to today. Sadly, I’ve seen companies try to make all three of the above work.

I know what you’re thinking and no, I’m not talking about fixing the office toilet.

When faced with an opportunity to grow and improve your business, do you handle projects in-house, augment your internal team with additional resources, or outsource the work entirely to a specialist?

There are pros and cons to all three, especially when you are looking to tackle an integration or implementation project at your company. Let’s dive in and review your options.

In-House

The default approach for many businesses. You know the people, trust them, and recognize their dedication to your company.

Pros:

• You and your team have full control over your resources and make every decision
• No overhead of outside resources to manage
• There is no ramp-up time as your team is fully acquainted with your system

Cons:

• Full scoping, planning, execution, and support must be completed by your team in addition to your regular roadmap
• Project resources are on your payroll, even once the project is complete
• An in-house team has a finite amount of bandwidth
• Internal team’s attention is split between innovation and maintenance of existing infrastructure
• Any “bad fit” employees or those without project work have to be let go

Augmentation

If your team doesn’t want to, or isn’t capable of delivering specialized projects on their own, it could be good to augment your existing team.

Pros:

• Supplement existing team with the right kinds of resources at the right time; swap as needed
• An Internal project manager/CTO/etc leads the project on a day-to-day basis
• You have full transparency of every decision
• Cost of talent goes away when the project is complete
• Extra hands can do the grunt work while your main team focuses on innovation

Cons:

• Burden of project management still belongs to you
• You have to account for ramp up time of the extra developers

Fully outsourced project

Call in the expertise of an outside team when your crew needs the room to focus on other initiatives, or if you don’t have the right resources available.

Pros:

• You have complete oversight without the day-to-day grind of managing resources
• Outsourced project manager helps define scope, perform business analysis, and map out user stories
• No commitment to resources at the end of the project
• You can capitalize project expenses
• Outsourced team brings domain expertise and insight from similar projects and can help you innovate faster
• Outsourced team brings skill sets your team may lack
• Outsourced team has a process and methodology that makes project execution faster and smoother
• Your development team is free to focus on the work best suited for them

Cons:

• An outsourced team doesn’t know your business as well as you do
• Any new team will need some amount of ramp up time

At Core10, we have helped a number of clients succeed at their initiatives through both augmentation and by providing entire teams. For example:

• We provided a team of implementation specialists that augment capital markets CRM DealCloud’s existing implementations department to provide their internal resources more bandwidth to successfully onboard new clients
• Our full team, from project manager to all levels of engineers, built a custom solution for a core banking provider to improve their lending solutions
• We handled numerous API integration projects for WalletFi, a payments account aggregator, as their outsourced development team
• We augmented Carepayment’s team of developers and project managers to complete integrations, provide support for their existing infrastructure, and build custom solutions for new innovations

They say hindsight is 20/20. Had I known that my toilet seat needed a pro to fix it, I would have saved my duct tape and asked my mom to call the plumber at the start.

Let us help you figure out how you can best achieve your goals and grow your business.

Which solution will best fit your needs? Do you still need help fleshing it out? Answer a few short questions to receive your personalized recommendation.