Outsource, don’t offshore
While the cost savings of offshoring are irrefutable, teams forgot to take into consideration the cultural differences in the deliverable expectations, ungodly work hours (5 AM Skype call?) and often requirements getting lost in translation. A good alternate to offshoring is outsourcing locally. Find a company that has at least a local management and creative team. If you do however offshore, expect to have resources available for local quality control to avoid frustrations of going back and forth. Finding a local company with onshore <> offshore model will most likely provide an optimal balance of cost and quality.
Verify credentials before hiring
Does the website have bios of founders….how about the quality of leadership? Is the company accredited with organizations like the Better Business Bureau? Has the team won any awards? Are they members of the local Ad Club…perhaps the Chamber of Commerce? Companies that are here to stay will invest in accreditation and professional memberships.
Involve them in planning
Web development companies do exactly that for a living. You will be pleasantly surprised with the input you get at the planning stage – both creative and technical. Involve them, share prototypes….wireframes…get their input. Good requirements make good software. Provide detailed requirements and demand high standards.
Use a project management and revision control tool
Quality of products is only as good as the people and processes. Most websites and applications need collaborative efforts from a team of people. You need Business Analysts to gather requirement, Project Manager, UI/UX designer to build wireframes and information architecture and developers to code. With so many minds involved in product development, it’s important to keep communication fluid and have the assets of the project in a central repository. A project management tool will do just that. Also they don’t have to expensive. Some of the popular tools like Basecamp and Zoho cost as little at $20/month. At Website Jungle we recently switched from Basecamp to Zoho. Also use a version control tool like Github or BitBucket manage code repository.
Micromanage the process not people
This is a natural extension of the previous point I was making. Regardless of the size of your team people need to know what their deliverables are and by when they are expected to complete it. Often times there are dependencies on tasks, so its very critical to layout a roadmap/plan and tasks assigned to the members of the team. Depending on the size of the team and type of project, you can either opt for the traditional waterfall methodology, where development lifecycle is divided into consecutive set of milestones or a agile methodology, where smaller builds or enhancements are put in place with shorter deployment cycles. Either way having a process and methodology in place will save you a lot of heartache and micromanaging, which managers should steer away from and team members anyway don’t appreciate. Fix the process before it becomes a morale issue.