Traditional approaches to accelerating product development often involve augmenting your existing teams with additional developers or outsourcing under the direction of your product and development leaders. This initially looks like the cheapest option to accelerate product delivery, particularly if you outsource overseas, and budget is a concern. However, augmentation and outsourcing can end up costing you a lot more than you originally planned.
In most cases, the initial top line figure does not reflect the accurate final cost because it assumes that an offshore or augmented approach to scaling will produce the right product features and the right level of quality in the timeframe you need — this is usually not the case and below I will explain why.
Compound interest of poor micro-decisions
As your product and development leaders are stretched across more development capacity, it becomes more challenging for them to maintain context and alignment across offshore or augmented teams. Stretching leadership bandwidth across outsourced or in-house augmented teams leads to unintentional and unhelpful micro-decisions which add hidden costs to your development project. The cumulative impact of misjudged micro-decisions has a negative compounding impact on the cost of software projects.
You can consider the impact of micro-decisions similar to the impact of a small imperfection in your golf swing on your overall golf score. A small slice on a golf swing can result in the ball being further away from the pin, adding an extra stroke or two to each hole. At the end of each round, the extra strokes add up. Instead of going around the course in 100 strokes, it could be more like 120. That extra 20 shots are what reflects the impact of incorrect micro-decisions with each swing.
When you focus on the top line figure for an offshore or augmented team, you must also consider the impact of the sum of thousands of discretionary micro-decisions made during day-to-day coding undertaken by developers of your product. There is no way for your managers to oversee or control each of these micro-decisions, so even when the small proportion of those daily micro-decisions are incorrect, it adds weeks and thousands of dollars to your development and supportability expenses.
How a strategic development model helps you accelerate
Propel Ventures has a record of delivering better quality products in less time and at a lower overall cost because we understand the compounding impact of these micro-decisions. Our last nine major projects were all delivered on time and budget, demonstrating that Propel Ventures delivers more cost-effectively than the traditional approach to scaling due to the process, context and experience of the Propel Ventures team.
To ensure the correct micro-decisions are made, Propel Ventures has a product management culture and process, which ensures that our team members are laser-focused on building the right thing, well. As part of the Propel Ventures software development process, the teams continually test, distil and disperse client feedback into the team members, leading to continuous course correction and refinement. Without this course correction, you increase the risk of your end product not being user-friendly, missing the product-market fit and increasing costs.
Additionally, we augment your current team by fitting inside your program of work by working inside but adjacent to your business to ensure maximum efficiency without distracting the existing team too much. The Propel Ventures model also serves to build upon your existing internal structure and technology in your teams — which means less disruption and more productivity, and final savings.
If you want a solution that won’t cost you even more money over the long term, contact Propel Ventures today.
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