Bringing Website Development In House

[Picto]

Basically the time has come. We're running four companies here with a combined monthly software development outgoing of £20k+ so the money is there to build a good team. Every single thing we want to do to move each business forward is in some way related to software development and it seems to be a constant roadblock. Also personally I'm sick of dealing with agencies who are big on promise and short on delivery.

I have several problems in doing this;

1. Whilst I'm a very able project manager and my marketing director has done part of an internet systems development qualification; neither of us really know that much about it.
2. The site is in ASP.NET
3. In the case of one business - the website and every aspect of it is absolutely business critical. If it went down for a week the business could go under.

I'd love to hear from someone who's been through this process before and hear some do's and don'ts from qualified board members

 

[Digital Ark]

Sorry can't not comment from experience. I did write an article about if it makes sense for a business owner to take on the design and maintenance of their web site.

Work out the best use of your employees and your own time. Is it better spent on developing your business or learning how to become web site experts?

 

[Picto]

Work out the best use of your employees and your own time. Is it better spent on developing your business or learning how to become web site experts?

The way I look at it if I hired a good lead ASP.NET developer on £65,000 and a junior developer on £35,000 I would still be halving my software development outgoing plus getting devoted developers onboard and out of hours support to boot. Currently I spend about 30% of my day project managing software projects remotely via phone, email and project management systems, so if I had to increase that to 50% of my time I would still be substantially up on where I am right now.

The benefit to the business if we get the right people would be huge, the websites are everything to the largest two companies they revolve around them.

 

[LinkBright Media]

In the case of one business - the website and every aspect of it is absolutely business critical. If it went down for a week the business could go under.

I used to be a software developer and now I have my own business I manage my own web development projects (I hire freelancers). Here's some tips

• 
  Get a managed dedicated hosting service which will take care of the server admin side of things for you. They'll keep the websites available for you and will provide round the clock support and should also be able offer you a backup/restore service.

• 
  Have a separate development environment and keep it separate from your live websites. Only allow your developer(s) to make changes in development and only after thorought testing should they be allowed to publish changes to your live website. That will keep things stable with minimal disruption to service.

As for the development, if you don't have a lot of experience yourself maybe you can consider an IT consultant to manage the project life cycles for you

Hope that helps a bit

 

[TotallySport]

I am a little confused to why your spending 20k a month on software. Personally I would hire a UK based company to come in and spec it out then build it, they will have the foundations inplace to to build the system (if you choose the right company), you also wouldn't have to worry about ahny other staffing issues.

Make sure you own the code and all rights to it, you can always take it inhouse at a later date.

I don't understand why you said asp.net is a problem?

 

[Picto]

I used to be a software developer and now I have my own business I manage my own web development projects (I hire freelancers). Here's some tips

• Get a managed dedicated hosting service which will take care of the server admin side of things for you. They'll keep the websites available for you and will provide round the clock support and should also be able offer you a backup/restore service.

• Have a separate development environment and keep it separate from your live websites. Only allow your developer(s) to make changes in development and only after thorought testing should they be allowed to publish changes to your live website. That will keep things stable with minimal disruption to service.

As for the development, if you don't have a lot of experience yourself maybe you can consider an IT consultant to manage the project life cycles for you

Hope that helps a bit

That's the kind of advice I need thanks, we have testing sites at the moment but managed hosting will be a definite when we first start

I am a little confused to why your spending 20k a month on software.

Lots of big projects going on, both new developments and redevelopments/CRO

Make sure you own the code and all rights to it, you can always take it inhouse at a later date.

I'm quite sure we do but that's definitely something I need to investigate further thanks

I don't understand why you said asp.net is a problem?

If you look at the cost/availablity of ASP.NET developers as opposed to PHP developers you'll see the problem!

 

[Picto]

Is there anyone on here who's been through the process of using agencies and then taking it in house? What I'm most intersted to hear about is the actual handover process. One of the agencies we use are huge and I know will deal with it very professionally. One of the smaller agencies probably won't

 

[awebapart.com]

The way I look at it if I hired a good lead ASP.NET developer on £65,000 and a junior developer on £35,000 I would still be halving my software development

But some say that to calculate the true cost of an employee you take their salary and add 40% to 100% on top of that, which could mean that rather than halving costs, you might break even.

As a software developer I've worked on both sides of the track, for software development companies delivering solutions for clients, and for company's in-house development teams, and there isn't much difference. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and sometimes with IT you get the same problems whichever approach you take. That's why trends are circular, there are so many larger companies out there that go in-house, then outsource, then decide to go inhouse again, then outsource again, and so on.

If you have that feeling of being held to ransom, or bent over a barrel by your external IT supplier, then I can say that I've definitely seen that too with in-house IT teams! Such is the nature of IT sometimes, and sometimes it can be the nature of some of the individuals involved too.

But I will also say that get the right individuals involved, the ones that can architect elegant (work smart not hard) IT solutions, then that can dramatically reduce your costs and stress, regardless of whether those individuals are internal or external. Some good developers and good solution archictects can end up being 100 times more valuable than the bad ones.

Who knows you might be lucky and you might be able to poach one of your supplier's developers. If your supplier gladly lets the developer go, that's when you have to start worrying!

One other tip and advantage of outsourcing, is if you can negotiate a fixed price contract, then if things go over-budget it is at the supplier's risk and cost. It's not easy to do this inhouse.

 

[awebapart.com]

One of the agencies we use are huge and I know will deal with it very professionally. One of the smaller agencies probably won't

So you have multiple development suppliers? Are these working together? If not, then there might be an advantage of bringing developments together, just to identify areas of commonality and reuse, to avoid duplicating development when wheels are reinvented.

But again this could be done internally or externally.

 

[j600com]

You need to do it VERY carefully, and really assess the pro's and con's. The grass isn't always greener.

I've picked up failed projects whereby in-house has gone wrong; the client came to us on the back of their in-house developer deciding one day they fancied going around the world and literally upped sticks and went travelling, leaving the site in limbo and only being able to pick-up emails at the odd internet cafe here and there.

I've also got a client who decided to go in-house, spent months developing a site (trying to recreate the site we'd built them) thinking they could save money only for the launch to be complete flop and sales take a catastrophic nose-dive. They came back to us needing their original site put back up, we were very accommodating but not all agencies would have took them back. They'd basically under-estimated just how good their original site was, and took for granted/disregarded all of the things we'd done to maximise performance/conversions (based on A/B testing) and assumed the new site would just do them anyway - and it didn't.

The problem you have is often an agency (certainly one of our size) has staff that specialise in various aspects of a project. I've met many people who claim to "do it all" and in 12 years am yet to actually meet one that could. I've never met a good designer who can code, nor a good coder who can design (they are just different types of individuals) and going deeper than that you need people who specialise in different areas such as SEO/Marketing, Retail, Conversions and so on. So possibly to re-create what you have now with a large agency you may actually need MUCH more than just a couple of developers (you may need an SEO guy, a designer, a sys admin, a project manager and so on). If you don't cover EVERYTHING sure as anything your coder won't know about SEO/Conversions/retailing and implement a weak checkout process, leave out something obvious like cross-selling, or even do black hat SEO without realising (I've seen it happen) and cause serious problems.

Recruiting this team could be an issue for you too, sourcing good developers isnt easy and could become a really tricky task if you don't know how to interview them - often a developer looks great on paper, then you take them on and realise all is not as it seems. Another issue you have is sickness/holidays/leavers - if you put all your sites into the hands of a small team (1-2 developers) even 1 of them leaving/being ill could cause serious problems. You'll sometimes find in-house teams go stale too or don't stay up to date with best practice - as they've not got the teams around them to spur them on or other functionality your dev company may be working on offered to them. E.g we've developed mCommerce and fCommerce recently and are now offering it to all our clients, potentially you wouldn't have had the resources to develop big projects if you had a team of 1 or 2 people as they'd be bogged down with day to day stuff (or it simply wouldn't even be on their radar).

At some point you may outgrow your ecommerce provider, but don't whatever you do under-estimate the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes without doing lots of due diligence first. Often its not a simple case of downloading magento and getting a couple of freelancers to "knock up" a website (although freelance magento developers may sell you otherwise). I'm not saying don't do it, just don't do it lightly.

I would also test the water by doing it first with your lowest performing website (minimise the risk) and see if you can actually get along with managing a dev team - let alone achieve the same level (or greater) success.

Hope this helps. Sorry if I'm teaching you how to suck eggs here - I've just seen it go wrong first hand (and been involved in the process of picking up the pieces).

ps. Ninjaneen's advice of getting a consultant involved isn't a bad idea at all.

 

[liams7]

Your using the wrong agencies.

And bringing in house doesnt always work. We have had it where some one took a website in house and were back to us with in 2 months because it just didnt work.

Liam

 

[Mustaka]

Lots of great sales pitches from development companies in this thread.

Now an answer from a company that does not offer development services.

For us we went with in house developers right from the start and would never out source anything ever. The critical thing for you is the senior developer. He must be able to demonstrate that he has experience not only coding but successful projects where he was a key systems architect. He must also be familiar with coding standards and be willing to fully document every single aspect of the software. Documentation is the key. He will leave at some point and someone will need to be able to jump into his code and know how things work.

I would look at spending some money with a decent recruitment consultant. A lot of time they will pre screen out the crap applicants and only send you decent ones.

The .net language is one of the best out there at the moment. Or rather I shall say the development environment is one of the best. The reason is the time it takes to development more complex functionality is a lot less than with php.

All the best with it either way you go.

 

[bdw]

I doubt that there are many ASP developers earning £65K per annum outside of London. Are you in London?

.

 

[MartCactus]

If you look at the cost/availablity of ASP.NET developers as opposed to PHP developers you'll see the problem!

ASP.net is the platform of choice for many larger commercial organisations, so I guess the demand for ASP.net developers is high. PHP being essentially a free technology does tend to mean that that the skills are more widely available (including much of the developing world).

I'd say that if you are spending 20k a month then it makes perfect sense to bring it in house. The main reason to use an agency would be
1) you don't have sufficient work, or its irregular (lots some months, nothing other months)
2) you need a wider array of skills than you could get with your own team.

Doesn't sound like either of those apply here.

Out of interest what do the businesses you run do?

 

[CompactCleaning]

The way I look at it if I hired a good lead ASP.NET developer on £65,000 and a junior developer on £35,000 I would still be halving my software development outgoing plus getting devoted developers onboard and out of hours support to boot. Currently I spend about 30% of my day project managing software projects remotely via phone, email and project management systems, so if I had to increase that to 50% of my time I would still be substantially up on where I am right now.

The benefit to the business if we get the right people would be huge, the websites are everything to the largest two companies they revolve around them.

Try it, do tempoary hire for say 1-2months see how it goes if it goes rubish revert back You won't know untill you try it.

Howard

 

[edmondscommerce]

You can presumably give this a soft trial - hire a smaller team to handle more menial stuff and let them grow into the role rather than trying to go for an absolute "throw the switch and hope for the best" dramatic change.

If your core team seem to do well then you can gradually increase their level of responsibility.