Nearshoring Guide Part 3: Finding the Right IT Partner
You have decided that nearshoring is the right practice for your company. You have also established a budget, researched what is the most appropriate location, and informed yourself about the knowledge and culture of the people who will be handling your future projects. But how can you make sure that you’re going to get the most out of this experience? Well, the truth is that you cannot know this beforehand. Fortunately, however, there are a few things you can do to maximize your projects’ chances for success.
Finding a true development partner that will guide you throughout this journey is paramount. Not only will you not have fluctuations regarding your budget, but you will also get a team that knows what it’s doing and isn’t afraid to adapt to any challenge that may arise.
Today’s story is precisely about this topic. How do we search for, choose, and create a partnership that lasts? From organisational and work culture matching, tailored engagement models that fit right in with your needs, to creating a DIY assessment guide that will provide the true answers you require to make an informed decision when choosing an IT partner.
One of the most important factors that should go into any decision-making process of choosing a remote partner is how alike you are in terms of organisational and work culture. Do you have the same approach when it comes to project management and team assignments? The cultural similarities that we’re talking about so intensely are formed due to some bigger factors that we’re about to disclose below.
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Organisational & Cultural Match
Having a strong westernised approach when it comes to their work and career lifestyles, Romanians are accustomed since a very early age with the importance of delivering quality and having an overall value-first approach towards work. Culture plays a huge role in overall business success. Whether we’re talking about the local culture or the one that is built inside a company, we must recognize the great importance that all this entails and that it can indeed make or break a partnership.
Having strong influences from the west, especially in Transylvania, more and more companies are settling in the modern and vibrant cities of Romania. People here have a nicely balanced mix between high levels of technical proficiencies in cutting edge technologies and also strong foreign language knowledge such as English, German, French, and Italian.
When talking about organisational culture, supporting diversity is one of the most important aspects that need to be thoroughly considered. This is exactly why having a common language, English in this case, that you can all communicate in, employees, clients, partners and so on, is crucial. Having employees that speak a second language, like German, can open up so many opportunities and your partners will be very grateful for this effort. So, aim for that partner who is willing to accommodate these things for you, who will always find ways to ease the communication between you and tries to understand and incorporate your own values into the overall work strategy.
Partner vs. Supplier
We keep referring to the outsourcing company as the “partner” and it’s of great importance that you understand why this type of relationship needs to be treated like a committed and honest partnership.
Every day, we’re seeing more and more software development firms getting into different projects having a quantitative perspective in mind, and being put in the situation where they are seen and treated as mere suppliers of software services. They are doing exactly what they are told to do, and so they remain simple executants. This happens very often with offshoring companies in Asia, where there are a lot of them on the market and their main goal is to attract as many projects as they can, without considering the workload and the quality of their results.
We strongly believe that nearshoring should be more about quality than anything else. That’s why it’s very important to treat every professional relationship like a partnership, one in which every side has a professional opinion on what’s best for that particular project. When this happens, you get a team of highly skilled professionals, that have active opinions and inputs over what’s the best course of action for your project. And trust us, you want it to be like that. A mere supplier will be satisfied to just get the job done, but a partner will do it and get you the best solutions taking into account the functionality, business needs, and the entire plan that’s been laid out for that product.
So, our advice is to take this matter into serious consideration. We cannot stress the importance of this type of relationship enough. It will dictate the outcome of your product and trust us, you want the best your money can buy. Even if your budget is limited, that doesn’t mean you cannot find that team that will go above and beyond to make it happen.
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Engagement Models
Because every partnership, need and project are different, you will probably want a business arrangement that will work best for that particular development project. A business engagement model is a framework chosen by a software development company to manage their clients and projects that ensures the control, flexibility, and responsibility needed to deliver the best results for that particular project.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach in software development. Every company, project, and task is different and requires a custom course of action. It is essential to understand this principle because if someone is trying to sell you otherwise, you must run for the hills. That collaboration will be faulty from the very start. Choosing the best engagement model for that software development project you need help with is the first step in aligning your goals and objectives with your future partners’. Having this established, you can predict a common outcome and set a realistic budget for that project. There are a few models to choose from, depending on the specifications of the project and your business needs.
Team augmentation. The practice of integrating select members that possess certain skills needed to complete the project into your own pre-existing development team. This method allows you to choose specific talent that best fits your environment and technical needs in order to get the desired results having total control over the day-to-day operations.
Benefits: reduced recruitment costs, no geographical limitations, skilled professionals.
Project-based. One of the most used models in outsourcing is the practice in which you choose the exact direction and workflow and your IT partner company provides you with the team that will perform the work for a specific project.
Benefits: no recruitment costs, full-service provider, dedicated development team.
Technological partnership. The most elevated form of outsourcing, it brings together the development company and the client in a trust-based relationship. In this type of partnership, you get continuous development and support approach that works towards innovation.
Benefits: the safety and security of a long-term partnership, a dedicated team with an entrepreneurial mindset, full-stack of development services tailored to your needs.
These are a few of the most used engagement models that nowadays software development companies offer. Whether you choose to test the waters with a project-based approach at first, always keep in mind exactly what you want out of your collaboration with this team. As technology is constantly evolving, strive to find a long-time partner that has the capacity to grow and innovate your business efforts.
Qubiz is a company that is 100% focused on people — both employees and clients. We’ve been in business for enough time to understand that putting people first is the thing that matters most in order to succeed in any undertaking. Our values are at the core of this culture: Client Centricity, Excellence, Teamwork, Trust and Respect, Fun and Entrepreneurship.
We consistently measure ourselves by these values. By breaking them down into concrete behaviours, we are able to create a roadmap for each employee and, using 360° feedback, they know what their strengths are and where to focus on growth in the future. We believe that having a good cultural match with our clients is the single most important thing that can ensure a high-value collaboration towards reaching business objectives.
We’ve been the technological partner of choice for many Western European companies in countries such as The Netherlands, The UK, and the DACH region. We’ve worked with both big and small companies from different industries and managed to successfully deliver cutting edge IT solutions for businesses that are on an ascending path towards innovation.
We can act as a one-stop-shop, by providing services that cover the whole application lifecycle, including functional design and consulting, software architecture design, UX/UI design, software development, QA, and finally — maintenance.
But don’t take our word for it. Binsoft, one of our dutch partners has agreed to share some insights into our proactive collaboration and all the good we’re doing through their innovative product — DoWell.
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DoWell — The story
Binsoft is a dutch company that has been our partner and client for some time now. Together we are developing a unique product that promises to innovate the field of commerce and retail by easing the communication between people.
The main product, DoWell, is a mobile application that uses a custom-built API that allows you to document all the information necessary to fulfil your customers’ needs and share those insights with all the people involved in that purchasing process. We live in a world where buying decisions are not fully informed and can be different from the same things available offline. Each store has different solutions to support buyer decisions. In complex buying processes, the DoWell app aims to unify the experience across all of them. To further discuss the functionality of this product, let’s take some practical examples.
In the interior design field, where there are multiple service providers like designers, retail stores, maintenance personnel and many others, the DoWell app can help with easing the communication between all of the people involved in that project. All the necessary information can be added to the buying process and so the home renovation or redesign decisions are made much quicker. In the area of furniture retail, for example, shops can implement the DoWell app and allow customers to have discussions around products. Also, the retail assistants can be part of these conversations and bring support to the decision-making process of their customers.
With our continuous support and innovative solutions, we aim to launch this product across industries so that people and companies can improve their retail processes and focus on what’s important — helping people achieve their goals.
Assessment Guide
In the attempt to bring some ease and clarity into your decision-making process of finding and choosing the rightful partner for your software development projects, we created an assessment guide that aims to do just that. This is especially helpful for companies that have just started to consider leveraging the strengths of an IT service provider.
To make an assessment of your potential partner, rate each of the below mentioned criteria with marks from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). Take a moment and rate each of them honestly. We found this method very useful in many other similar decisions that we’re facing each day and even our current clients have used it successfully.
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