How to find an outsourcing company for software customization development

It's a waste to find me after watching too many clients fall into the pit in recent years.

Let me first make a few suggestions:

1. Find a company with more technicians than salespeople, probably 10: 1. No matter whether it is pure outsourcing or customized outsourcing of non-standard products, the number of R&D personnel must be greater than the number of sales personnel, otherwise sales will be digging holes, and technology can't make up for it.

2. Find a company with 15-30 employees. They will attach importance to every customer, because the company does not have a good bargaining power in the development stage.

3. Give priority to local companies. Unless necessary, don't consider foreign teams, including those with so-called local branches. This will not only facilitate communication and solve problems, but also save costs.

4. Be sure to find someone who understands you. If you can talk, many things will be logical. If we talk about it, it must be the leader of the other party who has the ability to allocate resources, not the salesperson of Monday morning quarterback.

5. Find a good payment term. It is inevitable that the price of software development is opaque. Like gambling stones, both sides quote by experience and have no concept of workload. Simply cheaper than the price, maybe Party B can't finish the unfinished project and the money will be wasted. Only by paying less or not paying the advance payment can we strengthen the guarantee.

As for others, company qualifications, number of cases, solutions, products or case demonstrations, etc. It has certain reference value, but it is not important, because it has become a sales routine and has nothing to do with "reliable" things.

Too many failed software development projects.

In the process of starting a business, a small box that has been researched and explored in the front line of software development service industry has contacted at least hundreds of various projects and listed several customer cases:

Client A: The rich second generation O2O industry, started catering distribution, cooperated with a software company under the recommendation of a friend, and signed a contract at a cost far exceeding the industry price. According to the industry level, the system that could have been developed in three months has been delayed for half a year, but its function is very simple because it is not up to standard. A year later, I was going to invest in iterative optimization of the project, and the original supplier quoted an outrageous price. The rich second generation had no choice but to re-select suppliers. Due to the chaotic code and poor design of the original project, the previous project was overthrown and redeveloped from scratch, but the window period of the Internet project has already missed.

Client B: Insurance agency industry, with angel investment, is going to develop an insurance agency platform. The founder has an insurance background, market channels and contacts, and only needs a technical partner. In the absence of technical foundation, I chose to build my own technical team and recruited nearly 10 technical team from beginning to end. It took a year to develop the project, and a third-rate cottage effect was developed from the first-class design scheme. Because of quality reasons, the project has been delayed, and all the development budgets of the project have basically been consumed. Later, we solicited the opinions of investors and hoped to invest money again to restart the development project.

Client C: Health management industry. The company plans to make an APP. Because the boss's friend's company only does software development, he really wants to give the project to him. So the boss outsourced the whole project to a friend's technical development team. As a result, because the boss's friend's company actually had no development ability, it was privately subcontracted to a cheap technical team. This team is in bankruptcy, and even effective demand communication can't be done, and the project is seriously delayed. The boss lost the advance payment and chose to terminate the cooperation. After more than a month of negotiations, the project handover was completed, and both sides were very unhappy.

The recommendation of friends is not reliable, the recruitment of people is not reliable, and the undertaking of friends is not reliable. This thing really depends on feeling. But we must be clear about the following questions:

1. Looking for a personal team or a company?

2. What are the requirements for a reliable software outsourcing company?

3. Which channels can find reliable software outsourcing companies?

4. How to choose the most suitable one among the locked outsourcing companies?

Looking for a team or a company?

When an enterprise decides to outsource software, the first thing to consider is to find someone or a company to pick up the package.

Now there are more and more employees in the software industry, and you can often meet programmers around you. A friend of a friend may be a programmer.

It is easy to find programmers to do development, but the advantage of finding individual developers is that the development cost is the lowest. Generally, the development salary for one day ranges from 500- 1000. The problem with personal development is that most of them are part-time jobs. In addition to development, people need to do project design, UI, testing, communication, server deployment, online, post-maintenance and so on. Programmers are generally only good at one or two of them, and it is difficult to do all aspects of the project well without corresponding experience.

The company's software production experience and comprehensive ability are much stronger than individuals, and people with professional knowledge in pre-project communication, project design, project management and testing are responsible.

As for finding an individual or a company, if you are just doing a small app project, you can complete this project by finding a part-time designer and two part-time APP front-end and back-end developers. If your project is large in scale and requires high quality, and involves applications with certain technical difficulties, you'd better find a professional development company to develop it.

In addition, we meet many customers who only have a budget of tens of thousands of dollars but want to develop a complex application. It is unrealistic to find someone to find a company at this time. We can only suggest going to the market to find SAAS services or standardized products.

What do reliable technology development companies need?

The first thing is to be honest and reliable!

This is the primary consideration, and it is most important to do things reliably, otherwise there will be many pits in the process of cooperation. For example, the price is low and high, in order to pursue profits, the wrong guidance is made, the questions raised are delayed, all kinds of disharmony are set up, and the back door of the system is set up.

Many people have consulted the formulation of the contract and are worried about any unreasonable treaties in the contract. I think these are secondary contracts. In a human society like China, the contract is not too restrictive for Party B, and the litigation process is long and tedious. The emphasis is on the reliability of Party B.. Even if the problem is beyond the scope of the contract, the reliable service provider will try its best to help Party A solve the problem.

In addition, it is also very important to pay attention to requirements design and testing.

A complete development process is not only technology, but also involves design, management, testing and other links. Usually, the success or failure of a project depends on design and testing. Design determines the use process and presentation effect of the project, and testing determines the final quality, stability and actual experience of the project. If there are serious defects in the design and testing of the project, it will definitely have a great impact on the final effect of the project.

Often the workload of design and testing accounts for more than 1/3 of the project, so as to basically guarantee the delivery results. Most of the failed projects we encountered were caused by the failure of products and testing work.

It is natural that most customers' needs are not clearly expressed. If the design work is not in place, both parties will have a lot of understanding deviation, which will eventually lead to repeated revision and delivery. We meet many customers who ask for quotation without design, and many customers who have not confirmed the prototype with you, so let them do it first. This kind of project can only ask for more happiness, and bet stones by experience.

Often our design can only achieve 60 points by self-development, and the real delivery must achieve at least 90 points. These 30 points must be improved by testing.

Companies need to have many abilities, such as business docking ability, demand combing ability, business understanding ability, product design ability, UI design ability, technology development ability, project management ability, and quality control testing ability. Generally, there is no comprehensive company, but those who report a large number of products and tests in the inquiry form and chase after Party A to confirm the design in the implementation process are often truly reliable companies.

Which channels can find reliable software outsourcing companies?

No matter which software outsourcing company is chosen to undertake the project, local companies and teams should be given priority. Generally, the technical level of developed cities is available, especially the development of application software. It is really not difficult to realize the technology, mainly by carefully designing the requirements. Choosing a local company can not only facilitate communication and solve problems, but also save costs.

In addition, the key to reliability is the importance that the R&D team attaches to your project. I suggest you don't look for a company with more than 100 employees. On the one hand, these bigger companies have mature ability to deal with troubles, and you are likely to be shocked by their sales. On the other hand, these companies have a large number of projects, and the importance of your project may be reduced. Many functions have not been thought out in the early stage, and there is no room for adjustment, so you will enter the stage of wrangling. You know, you will be defeated by the excellent after-sales service of big companies.

On this basis, you can find software outsourcing companies in several ways.

1, find professional friends in the industry to recommend.

In fact, this is the first choice for customers who know nothing, but it is very important for friends to be professional, credible and knowledgeable. Because he will help you with the pre-screening and screening, will help you with the objective position analysis, and recommend the right company or development team. Even if you think your friend's recommendation may be of interest, compared with the success of the final project, a professional consulting fee is worth it, and he has to endorse it.

2. Search through search engines

This is the easiest way. In this way, you can quickly find dozens or hundreds of technical service providers. You need to find companies that have put Baidu's bidding ranking, which will greatly narrow your target range. First of all, advertising has geographical restrictions. If you can advertise in your city, it means that you have the ability to serve in the local area, and it is easy for you to inspect. The general marketing and marketing ability of advertising is strong, but the technical and design ability is not necessarily excellent, and the business volume and the number of consultants are large. Whether you can pay attention to your project or not, you have to investigate it yourself. Generally, don't look for companies that don't promote. Companies engaged in leather bag business are easy to find unless they have a certain reputation.

3. Search through the partner platforms of the cloud market such as Ali Tencent Huawei.

At present, cloud services are gradually breaking through the scope of the Internet market. Governments and enterprises in various industries have also begun to accept the concept of cloud services, and began to change from the traditional self-built IT model to the public cloud service model. The current cloud computing service has entered the saas service stage from infrastructure services such as virtualization and parallel computing, and has begun to form mainstream platforms and standards through deep competition.

At present, the largest ecosystems are Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud. By providing computing resources and underlying services, they let ecological partners provide them with solutions and software project support. Because of the strict screening mechanism, all companies that join its partner program have certain technical strength. You can find local software outsourcing companies through these cloud markets and get a reliable endorsement of BAT through online transactions in the cloud market.

Of course, outsourcing enterprises can also be found on platforms such as Pig Bajie, China Soft Liberation and Ma Shi, but the quality of services and projects is low, which is suitable for some small projects or demanders with low quality requirements and price sensitivity.

How to choose the most suitable outsourcing company?

After preliminary screening and communication, we can lock in several reliable outsourcing companies, but which one should we choose for cooperation? This involves a lot of professional judgment and skills. If you have friends in the industry around you, it is recommended to consult your friends' professional opinions, and provide some reference opinions from the aspects of the rationality of the quotation, the technical ability of the company, the importance attached to the project, whether similar cases can be provided, and the rationality of the demand sorting scheme. If you can't find friends in this field, you can trust me privately. I will give you some reasonable suggestions from an objective and professional point of view.

At the beginning of the article, I have provided some judgment and selection methods that do not require professional skills:

1. Find a company with more technicians than salespeople.

2. Find a company with 15-30 employees.

3. Find a local company.

4. Ask the leader of the other company to personally catch the company of your project.

5. Look for companies with little or no advance payment.

On the basis of the above, the most important thing is the comparison of prices. I believe that when many people get multiple quotation schemes, they look at a loss and don't know how to compare them. The quotation of each company varies greatly, and the demand description and functional planning are also different. There is no standard comparison. At this time, for non-professionals, it may only be the final price, which is a big misunderstanding.

Ideally, as Party A, we should describe our requirements documents clearly as far as possible, and it is best to find several reliable companies to make inquiries after completing the construction scheme design to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the requirements. In fact, for a long time, the pre-sales staff of interested cooperative enterprises have responded to customers' needs in the software industry and provided solutions for free in order to win projects. Pre-sales consulting design is very shallow, and there are some problems, such as avoiding reality and being illusory, or deliberately misleading for the benefit. The scheme usually stays in the document description stage, and the prototype is often designed after winning the bid, so the quotation is moisture.

In order to obtain meaningful quotation, we generally suggest that the project be divided into consulting bid and construction bid, and the third party company should provide consulting and design services, instead of designing for winning the bid, and then comparing the price with the final design data or bidding, so that the demand is clear and the budget is accurate, which is the greatest protection for our own project. It is very reliable to adopt the lowest price in a round of competition with clear demand.

It is particularly important to point out that the comparison must be conducted among reliable companies, but in the process of comparison, the requirements for company qualifications, case numbers, solutions, products or case demonstrations are actually not as important as imagined, because as mentioned above, these things do not constitute reliable key elements, but provide rent-seeking space for operating projects.

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Small Box is a software outsourcing company, which mainly undertakes all kinds of large-scale software projects (including self-developed products). Its main business is divided into two parts: software development and operation and maintenance support.

Software development: pay attention to the whole software project and help the project undertaker complete the delivery task. Operation and maintenance support: the operation and maintenance workload is not saturated, which reduces the operation cost of customers.

A small box is mainly engaged in software projects, and it is our responsibility to help the project undertaker complete the delivery task. Customer's requirements are: delivery on time and with good quality, ensuring maximum profit and minimum risk. Looking for us is the best choice for customers, and we look forward to cooperating with you. Finally, we are really safe and make friends!