Whenever you're tasked with solving an IT problem, you often have an important choice to make. You can select an individual ASP.NET developer or enlist the services of an ASP.NET development firm to act as a trusted partner moving forward.
On the one hand, hiring an individual developer does make a certain amount of sense - at least on paper. This is an in-house employee who answers exclusively to you and who can devote the entirety of their attention to supporting the operations software needed to help run your business. But at the same time, choosing to go with an ASP.NET development team brings with it a wide range of different benefits that most businesses simply cannot afford to ignore.
Individual Developers vs. the Team Approach: Breaking Things Down
Oftentimes, organizations will choose to hire an individual ASP.NET programmer specifically to work on a web project. They have older software that is in desperate need of not only long-term maintenance, but upgrades to extract more value as the needs of the company change and to generate superior performance over time.
The issue with this is that one person simply cannot complete the amount of work that an entire team could deliver in any given time period. It's easy to imagine a situation where it may take a single programmer nine months to deliver an application, whereas an ASP.NET team may be able to do it in three. How much would it cost you to not have a functioning business application for the duration of those six months? How much are you losing in terms of reduced productivity and heightened business risk from all team members, customers and management who need to be able to use that application immediately?
If you need your project completed faster, you need to either hire an additional programmer or find contract help. At that point, the scalability of the developer becomes a major bottleneck for the project.
This also creates a negative ripple effect in other ways, too. If you bring in your own in-house ASP.NET developer, you now have to carry the costs of additional employees when they are not needed for peak performance times. Your needs will naturally fluctuate and under this situation, you can't hire for those peak periods without also paying the programmer during the valleys of the workload of projects you're dealing with.
If your programming needs are intense for, say, a nine-month duration of a development project, that's great - but what happens if it's another year before things return to this level of intensity? You're either paying an individual ASP.NET developer to essentially spin their wheels, or you let them go. Then, when the next project comes around, you're right back where you started. You're trapped in an endless cycle that causes development to take longer and cost more money than it should.
Likewise, when an internal ASP.NET web development team is responsible for maintaining your current systems, they often simply do not have the time to invest in building a new application. They'll quickly become spread far too thin and the quality of everything they have their hands in will begin to suffer.
The Experience of ASP.NET Teams
It's equally important to consider that any ASP.NET programmer will always have a unique set of skills and experience based on previous jobs and projects they've participated in. Maybe they worked in a single industry for one employer for 10 years and they became great at solving in that industry. But what if that industry isn't your own? What if you have an entirely new set of problems they've never contemplated with before?
Your programmer may only have experience with desktop application development, for example. At that point, they wouldn't be able to offer much in the way of help towards developing web-based applications in ASP.NET at all.
Whereas an individual developer may not have the broad set of skills that you need, a dedicated, experienced ASP.NET development team will. They'll have far more depth and can always fill in the gaps, regardless of the current requirements of the project or how they continue to grow and evolve in the future.
Whenever new ASP.NET web applications are under development, the team working on the project needs skill sets that go beyond simple programming - all in the name of creating the best user experience possible. Programmers are not necessarily known for having excellent communication skills, for example. In that situation, a seasoned business analyst would be invaluable for understanding and meeting the stakeholder’s requirements for the development project.
Even some of the very best ASP.NET developers in the business are not necessarily skilled at creating user interfaces. Here, a seasoned UI designer would be able to help you design the best user experience that will have the biggest positive impact on your team's productivity.
It is very, very unlikely that you'll be able to find a single ASP.NET programmer that encompasses all of these skills - making this another way that an outsourced team can give you a significant competitive advantage.
Leveraging the Team Dynamic to Your Advantage
One of the most important reasons why an ASP.NET development team is a better option than an individual ASP.NET consultant is also the one that most people usually overlook: the team dynamic. It doesn't matter how complex your project is or what the requirements are, it will always be better to have multiple sets of eyes looking at, analyzing and proposing solutions for every problem. Not only will they usually come up with a more effective solution than an individual can, but they'll arrive at those conclusions faster as well.
Finally, understand that if you hire an individual ASP.NET programmer, you now have to manage both the programmer and the project itself. Suddenly one task has just become two significantly more complicated ones. If you hire an ASP.NET development team, on the other hand, this won't be a concern. The team itself will come with skilled project managers who have the essential skills necessary to make sure the project is completed on-time and within your budget to your specification.
Not only does this take one more tasks off your plate, but it also helps free up as much of your valuable time as possible so that you can focus on more strategic activities related to growing your business.
In the end, an ASP.NET development firm will always be a better choice than simply going with a lone individual programmer. This is especially true when it comes to web application development, as the team will have both the deeper set of skills needed to tackle more complex requirements and the bandwidth necessary to manage everything effectively through those inevitable peaks in development workload. An ASP.NET development team will also manage the software project for you - rather than the situation requiring one person to do so while also completing their regular duties.
The outsourced ASP.NET development team will be able to successfully handle all of these matters without extending the duration of the project - meaning that you get the web-based application you need as fast as possible. This helps improve the productivity of your own employees right away, while also reducing the time it takes you to see a return on investment for the new solution as well. That in and of itself may very well be the most important benefit of all.
To find out more information about our ASP.NET software development outsourcing capabilities, or if you’d like to discuss your ASP.NET needs with Keene Systems CEO, Lance Keene click here to book a call with him. You can also download our great new eBook - Why ASP.NET Development Services Fuels Business Growth - to learn more about this essential topic.
