#Staff Augmentation Vs Project-Based Consulting

[meetthakkar1]

Staff Augmentation Vs Project-Based Consulting

Nowadays, selecting the right approach to scale your business and manage your project is very important in this competitive era. Here we will understand two popular strategies which often considered by firms Staff Augmentation and Project-Based Consulting. In this article, we will understand what is staff augmentation and Project-Based Consulting as well as key features so it would be easy for organizations to choose the right option.

For more details: https://medium.com/@jigar.agrawal/staff-augmentation-vs-project-based-consulting-0ae5d5879238

[appson]

Consulting or Staff Augmentation? Here’s What Works Best for Your Business

In today's fast-paced, tech-driven business world, companies must remain agile and efficient to stay competitive. Whether you're scaling up, launching a new project, or navigating digital transformation, one crucial decision you must make is: staff augmentation vs consulting. Which one will help you hit your targets faster, better, and with minimal risk?

In this blog, we’ll break down the differences, benefits, and limitations of both staff augmentation services and business consulting services to help you choose the right fit for your organization.

 What is Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation is a flexible outsourcing model that allows businesses to hire skilled professionals on a temporary basis to fill talent gaps. Instead of onboarding full-time employees, you bring in external experts who integrate with your in-house teams to support specific projects.

Key Benefits:

Scalability on demand

Cost-effective hiring

Faster recruitment and onboarding

Access to a global talent pool

Full control over project management

This model is perfect for short-term needs, urgent project deliveries, or when your internal team lacks a specific skill set.

What are Business Consulting Services?

Business consulting services involve hiring a third-party expert or firm to analyze, advise, and implement solutions for your business challenges. Consultants bring industry knowledge, strategic insights, and an outsider perspective that can lead to significant organizational improvements.

Key Benefits:

Expert advice based on market best practices

Objective assessment of your processes and goals

Strategic roadmap creation and implementation

Faster decision-making support

High-level problem-solving skills

Consulting is ideal when you need guidance in areas like transformation strategy, digital adoption, operations, or financial restructuring.

When to Choose Staff Augmentation

Choose staff augmentation services if:

You have a temporary need for specialized skills

Your project timelines are tight

You need to scale your team quickly

You want to retain full project control

You're looking for a cost-effective hiring model

This model supports companies in industries like IT, engineering, and digital marketing, where agile development and rapid scaling are crucial.

 When to Choose Business Consulting Services

Opt for business consulting services if:

You lack clarity in your business strategy

You need guidance through transformation

You're entering new markets or launching new services

You want to optimize existing operations

You need high-level expertise not available in-house

Consulting services are perfect for businesses undergoing change, facing complex decisions, or needing outside perspective.

 Combining the Best of Both Worlds

In many cases, companies benefit from hybrid staffing solutions for businesses that combine staff augmentation and consulting. For example, a consultant may develop a digital transformation strategy, and augmented staff may execute the technical aspects.

This blended model offers:

Strategic insight with hands-on execution

Better alignment between vision and output

Seamless scalability and faster delivery

 Real-World Example

Imagine a software company launching a new SaaS product. They may hire a business consultant to help with market entry strategy while also augmenting their internal development team with additional engineers and UX designers.

This ensures that both the "what" (strategy) and the "how" (execution) are handled efficiently.

 Final Thoughts

The choice between staff augmentation vs consulting depends on your current needs, budget, project goals, and internal capabilities. If you seek agility, flexibility, and short-term support, staff augmentation services are your go-to. But if you require expertise, strategy, and transformation leadership, opt for business consulting services.

Still unsure? At Appson Technologies, we offer customized staffing solutions for businesses that bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Visit our website at appsontechnologies.com/ for more details.

​Original Source: bit.ly/4jShOsL

[infowindtech57]

Staff Augmentation VS Outsourcing: Which Is Better Unlimited Guide

Whether to explore staff augmentation vs outsourcing can be a critical decision when growing your firm and taking on new initiatives. Business executives must carefully consider their options as each has unique benefits and possible disadvantages. Businesses need to be aware of the distinct qualities and ramifications of staff augmentation as opposed to outsourcing. This will enable them to more effectively modify their plans in order to meet their unique objectives and resource needs.

We’ll compare staff augmentation versus outsourcing in this post, giving you the knowledge you need to make decisions that will advance your company. 

What Is Staff Augmentation?

Simply said, staff augmentation is the practice of hiring outside labor for tasks that fit the organization’s goals and staffing needs at the moment. For example, your company need seven developers to produce game software.. You want competent developers with a strong track record of building dependable apps, so if your internal development team currently only consists of four people, it could take a month or two to fill the void and hire four outstanding developers, delaying the launch of your project and keeping you from making the money you had planned.

But with staff augmentation, you may quickly hire the three developers in a matter of weeks, which will speed up the project’s completion and the release of the product. Additionally, a common component of the cooperative workforce augmentation approach is outsourcing. Consequently, after your software launches, you won’t have to fire the developers that worked on it.. By doing this, you’ll be able to sidestep the paperwork and legal headaches associated with full-time work.

What Is IT Outsourcing 

The process of elevating several software business requirements to outside service providers who are knowledgeable or experienced in achieving quality standards and providing software solutions is known as IT outsourcing. Beginning as a way to save money, the IT outsourcing industry has expanded rapidly to become a popular way for companies to find unrealized benefits of project outsourcing and acquire access to skilled workers.

This includes overseeing a single project or procedure as well as a range of smaller tasks. The IT outsourcing company manages every step of the software development lifecycle, including conception, designing, development, testing, deployment, updates, and maintenance services. Software outsourcing businesses offer a variety of tech support options, including project-based, completely managed, co-sourced, and typically facility augmentation through the use of experienced workers from other IT outsourcing providers.Staff Augmentation VS Outsourcing

Staff augmentation pros and cons

Let’s examine the key differences between contracting and staffing and then examine the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy in more detail.

Pros of Staff Augmentation

Unlimited Talent Available for Hiring

One of the primary benefits of staff augmentation is the capacity to employ talent regardless of location. One worldwide approach is staff augmentation. This implies that you have access to professionals from across the globe. This is of great assistance to businesses. Normally, such a wide range of expertise cannot be consulted. Additionally, you can bolster your team with experts from the best IT staff augmentation company. For any IT company, this is a huge competitive advantage.

Increased Scalability

Scalability is critical to business operations. A company’s ability to continue operating at the same costs, output, and productivity in the face of increased workloads is typically a strong sign of success. For this reason, all businesses want to implement scalable strategies. Staff augmentation is a highly scalable solution. Your crew can be quickly scaled to meet your arbitrary needs.

Extremely economical

The standard hiring procedures are laborious and time-consuming. Applying traditional hiring practices to your business will unintentionally commit you to a drawn-out hiring procedure. Consider the other option. Simply said, when you augment your team, you are employing the professionals for the time that you require them. 

Why is this superior to the other option? It’s not as drawn out or lengthy. Furthermore, you do not require additional training or onboarding initiatives. In their specialized sectors, the professionals already possess extensive training. So, you won’t be responsible for paying for any additional training yourself. This lowers the hiring costs considerably.

Cons of Adding More Staff

After going over some of the pros of staff augmentation, let’s talk about the drawbacks. Recall that no tactic is infallible. Every endeavor has its share of risks. But keep in mind that there are a lot of benefits to staff augmentation as well.

A rise in the workload

It’s crucial to keep in mind that staff augmentation is an additional tactic for your consideration. It thereby strengthens your team. It doesn’t seize total command of your group. Your team leaders would unintentionally have extra work to do as a result. More employees will need to be supervised by your supervisors. They will be under increased strain. It could be challenging to be in this role if your organization is understaffed or has a shortage of leaders. Nevertheless, if you’re thinking about using this tactic for your business, it’s crucial to take it into account.

Variations in Time Zones

Unrestricted knowledge can be a blessing, but it also has disadvantages. Working across time zones will come with having a globally enhanced staff. You must be aware that working with individuals from other nations may require you to work in challenging time zones. When they hire foreign workers, most businesses have to make this tradeoff.

Barriers related to language and culture

As with the last time zone consideration, it’s critical to be aware of linguistic and cultural variations.

IT Outsourcing Pros And Cons

As with our last part, we will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing.

Benefits of Outsourcing

Less Workload

You may unwind a little bit with project outsourcing, which is the nicest thing! The task is entirely outsourced; thus, less project management is needed. As a result, the vendor is in complete control of project management. All of your concerns can be put aside while you concentrate on the project’s outcome!

Getting in touch with foreign professionals

The IT sector is positively growing in a few nations. There are several benefits to outsourcing your work abroad to businesses that are established in other nations. This is an enormous benefit if your project is being outsourced. You will have direct access to international specialists. Furthermore, you can fully rely on those professionals to realize your goal.

Requires Less Training

While augmentation and outsourcing differ significantly, they both remove the obstacles associated with the conventional employment procedure. You won’t have to go through the hassle of educating professionals when you outsource your job to them. Therefore, while outsourcing a project, you won’t have to undergo any arduous training unless you have certain legal duties.

The Drawbacks of IT Outsourcing

Absence of Command

The loss of control is one of the most often mentioned issues with outsourcing. You have to cede control of the project because the third-party provider takes full responsibility for it. This is an essential consideration. It’s important to maintain open communication with your contractors. Vendors also need regular updates to ensure smooth operations. Keeping lines of communication clear prevents misunderstandings. This shouldn’t be an issue if you have enough faith in your seller. Even so, you still need to have open lines of communication. Before entrusting the project to the suppliers, all details on deadlines, expectations, and other issues should be made explicit.

Greater Cost

You just need to pay the contractors for the time that you specifically hired them for when using staff augmentation. Conversely, outsourcing necessitates payment contingent on project completion. Project outsourcing frequently results in higher expenses. Outsourcing providers frequently charge up to 30% extra because they assume the project’s risks. Depending on the company’s policies, you often pay an hourly or monthly charge for staff augmentation.

Additionally, outsourcing firms frequently decline smaller assignments. Considering that they do not think smaller projects are cost-effective. Because of this, they frequently charge more for smaller projects that they take on. They are, therefore, more costly than their equivalents with augmentation.

Hard to Incorporate

Integration is a key differentiator between staff augmentation and software outsourcing. By adding specialists to your current internal team, you are implementing augmentation. But when you outsource, you are entrusting an outside group of professionals with your project. The moving pieces of your project could become challenging as a result. Parts of your project will be entirely under your control. However, some aspects may not offer the same level of control. This difference depends on the nature of the tasks and their complexity. This strategy’s drawbacks are the control dissonance and integration challenges.

Since we know all about the terms, let’s move on to understanding staff augmentation vs outsourcing.

Comparing Staff Augmentation vs Outsourcing: Important Considerations

The following elements should be taken into account by organizations when determining whether to use staff augmentation or outsourcing:

The project’s duration and scope

The choice between hiring more employees and outsourcing could be impacted by the project’s size and duration. For short-term tasks that call for specialized knowledge that the current team might not have, staff augmentation makes more sense. Long-term projects with several phases, varying skill requirements, or staffing flexibility are well suited for outsourcing.

Price and spending plan

The costs associated with staff augmentation and outsourcing vary depending on a number of variables, including geography, skill levels, and market demand. When necessary talents are easily obtained locally, staff augmentation can be more economical, but, outsourcing might be less expensive for highly skilled workers and in nations with lower living standards.

Availability of internal resources

Staff augmentation could be a better option if an organization has a trained workforce capable of taking on new responsibilities. To guarantee prompt and high-quality project delivery, outsourcing can be the best choice if the internal team lacks the necessary experience.

Supervision and control of the project

Staff augmentation enables the project to have more internal control. The new hires are subject to the same workflow and management procedures. Since the external vendor will handle part of the project management and communication, outsourcing may have an influence on control.

Objectives and goals

Staff augmentation can help meet the urgent need for skilled resources on a specific project. This approach brings immediate access to qualified professionals without the long hiring process. Outsourcing, on the other hand, offers strategic benefits beyond staffing. These include entering new markets, using advanced technology, and leveraging highly skilled labor.

It’s important to think carefully before deciding between outsourcing and staff augmentation. You must assess project needs, available workforce, and budget. Additionally, it’s essential to evaluate the long-term impact on your organization. The choice must be consistent with the overarching corporate strategy as well as immediate objectives.

Which is the Better Option: Outsourcing or Staff Augmentation?

Depending on the goals of the project, you might decide between outsourcing and software augmentation. Software augmentation offers flexibility in scaling your team as needed. Outsourcing, on the other hand, can handle entire project tasks externally. We’re not able to call it for you. You will have to make that decision on your own.

The differences between contracting and staffing are enormous. The nature of your project must be taken into account. Is this an ongoing project? In that instance, outsourcing might be a good choice. An agile method is most likely the best choice for a project with a shorter duration and more stringent deadline.

This also relies on how much of your control you’re ready to give up. It’s likely that the experience your team needs to finish the project is lacking. At that point, outsourcing makes more sense. You might just assign the project to a third party business. This is helpful when there are particular deficiencies or knowledge gaps in the team that are difficult to quickly fill.

Staff augmentation is the best choice, though, if your team already possesses certain experience and you want to share that expertise with new individuals.

You can make the best decision for yourself by considering a few factors. These include the project’s nature, cost, and your company’s objectives. There are advantages to both staff augmentation and outsourcing. It all relies on your unique requirements. Between the two, there is no definitive right or wrong decision. You must evaluate which option aligns with your goals. For some, staff augmentation offers flexibility. Others may prefer outsourcing for cost-effectiveness. 

Conclusion 

Finding a way to make a concept a reality is the most important thing for a firm. This explains why different companies employ different strategies. Making decisions on the future of your company is one of the most significant ones you will have to make. Businesses must be aware of the distinctions between outsourcing and staff augmentation. Additionally, recognizing the contrasts between contracting and staffing is equally crucial.

These distinctions can significantly impact how you manage your workforce and projects. Through staff augmentation, you can hire specialized talent on a temporary basis. Conversely, outsourcing entails giving full responsibility for activities or projects to a team outside the organization. Both options offer flexibility, but their use cases vary.

There is no absolute right or wrong choice between these options. The best path for your company depends on several factors. These include the type of project, its duration, and its scale. Additionally, your budget plays a significant role in making the right decision.

We trust that this explanation of staff augmentation versus outsourcing has made things clearer. When choosing a choice, it’s critical to give each one careful consideration. Your business will benefit more from your decision if you are more educated. In the end, the secret to success is to match your decision with the particular requirements of your business. 

FAQ

Which IT sector staffing models are some of the most well-known?

In the IT industry, full-time employee employment, IT staff augmentation, outsourcing, consultancy, and hybrid models are some of the most common staffing arrangements. The debate between staff augmentation and outsourcing is highly prevalent among businesses among all these possibilities.

Which renowned Indian companies specialize in staff augmentation?

Prominent names in team augmentation include HCL Technologies, TCS, eLuminous Technologies, Applify, and Supersourcing. Examine the portfolio and case studies to gauge competency before establishing contact with any similar companies.

What are a few noteworthy benefits of outsourcing IT?

Quick response times, job distribution, cost savings, and access to specialized personnel are a few of the primary advantages of project outsourcing. To enjoy all these professionals at affordable prices, get in touch with Team eLuminous.

What are the key benefits of hiring more IT staff?

You can connect with committed experts through team augmentation and hire them on a temporary basis. Interestingly, you don’t have to interview these professionals or carry out in-depth assessments of them. The talent-sourcing aspect is handled by the IT vendor providing these services.

What distinguishes staff augmentation from outsourcing?

Organizations employ the staff augmentation strategy to bring on temporary workers to cover unforeseen demands. For instance, a software business brings on more developers to finish a crucial project on schedule. Delegating a task or a procedure to a third party—typically based abroad—is known as outsourcing.

[appsonstaffaugmentation]

Staff Augmentation vs. Managed Services: Powering Your Growth with the Right Strategy

In today's dynamic business landscape, scaling your team efficiently and effectively is crucial for success. But with two popular options like staff augmentation and managed services, choosing the right path can be confusing. Fear not, Appson Technologies is here to guide you!

Understanding the Landscape:

Staff Augmentation: Think of it as hiring skilled professionals on-demand. You retain control over project direction, while gaining access to specialized expertise for specific tasks or projects. Managed Services: Here, you hand over the reins. An external provider takes complete responsibility for a specific function or process, delivering desired outcomes.

Choosing the Right Fit:

Staff Augmentation shines for: Short-term needs: Ideal for temporary projects or filling skill gaps without long-term commitments. Specialized expertise: Access niche talent you might not find in-house, boosting your team's capabilities. Cost-effectiveness: Pay only for the expertise you need, reducing overhead costs compared to full-time hires. Flexibility: Scale your team up or down easily based on project requirements.

Managed Services excel when: Long-term commitment: Need ongoing support for a specific function? Managed services provide stability and expertise. Complex processes: Outsource entire tasks like IT infrastructure management or marketing campaigns for streamlined operations. Predictable costs: Enjoy fixed monthly fees and avoid the hassle of managing personnel costs. Reduced workload: Free up your internal resources to focus on core business activities. Appson Technologies: Your Staff Augmentation Partner!

While both options have their merits, Appson Technologies believes staff augmentation offers unmatched flexibility and value for most businesses. Here's why:

Unparalleled Expertise: We have a vast pool of pre-vetted, highly skilled professionals across diverse domains. Seamless Integration: Our team seamlessly integrates into your existing workflow, ensuring smooth collaboration. Cost Transparency: Enjoy clear pricing models and pay only for the hours worked, with no hidden fees. Dedicated Support: Our team is always available to answer questions and provide guidance throughout the engagement. Ready to take the next step?

Contact Appson Technologies today for a free consultation! We'll help you assess your needs, identify the perfect staff augmentation solution, and empower your team to achieve its full potential.

[jellyfishtechnologies]

Learn when to use staff augmentation to enhance your team's capabilities, or when to choose project-based consulting for specific goals. In our latest article, we explore the differences between staff augmentation and Project-Based Consulting. Learn the pros and cons of each approach so you can make an informed decision for your business.

[wolfmatrix]

How To Choose The Right Staff Augmentation Service?

Can it be a startup or a Fortune 500 business, businesses worldwide are looking for decreasing operational and management expenses. That is the reason why they often outsource their project to reduce managerial burden. A number of them even have their in-house teams but are looking to bring the essential experience with minimum time and price on recruitment and training. When in-house teams don't meet all market wants and spend a good deal of time, cash, and recruiting efforts instead of prioritizing on-time project deliverables, staff augmentation comes into play.

Firms are now starting to make the most of flexible staffing models like personnel augmentation. Augmenting a staff model helps to fill the skill gap by combining the advantages of the in-house outsourcing and hiring. Whether you're a startup focusing on getting a new job or a well-established firm searching for staffing solutions in a foreign market, staff augmentation may be a perfect alternative. This is our in-depth guide to assist you choose the right staff enhancement supplier.

The way to ascertain staff augmentation is the right model for you?

Staff augmentation is much more synonymous with the IT industries, but it can help any company that requires skilled human resources to deal with short or long-term solutions.

Staff augmentation might be a perfect option in a vast range of situations. Here are some points to Find out while choosing the enhancement model:

Occasionally a corporation might need to incorporate new staff members and save up recruiting, coaching, and staff management. Augmenting staff is an ideal alternative.

When a item is at a last phase of its growth, the product team recommends that a company hire new temporary employees to check the item before its rollout. Staff augmentation comes into play.

Let us say you already have software engineers working on one of the huge projects, but you want to scale your staff to have many programmers to develop another module of the products. Nowadays you have to employ a team of 5-15 tech professionals, but it's impossible due to the shortage of the local talent in the organization. You understand that local recruitment will take way longer rather than feasible at the moment.

You're working on large projects with a staff. But a project requires technical knowledge, which in-house workers do not have, possibly selecting some people that did not work out. Nowadays you intend to hire from other countries/locations. Augmenting a team is an ideal solution for the specified scenario!

Contrary to you collaborate using a project outsourcing firm to develop products, the design doesn't fit you. The main reason is; to begin with, you want to communicate with your staff regularly, and secondly, you want to be well-connected with your remote team to be certain they feel as part of your company. With the staff enhancement version, it's a lot easier to integrate teams either locally or across the nation.

Things to Understand While Selecting the Right Staff Augmentation Service

Evaluate Contract Processes

Using a staff augmentation agency which may understand contract procedures and tackle the usual challenges is crucial to a organization's betterment.

A thorough contract procedure streamlines your business goals and helps save time and money whenever you work with a contract arrangement. The secret is to have a detailed contract arrangement that may help to simplify the procedure.

For example, if your staffing partner can only offer you a bit of boilerplate contract that lacks the originality that might be a sign, they lack the tools or experience to handle the undertaking or resource-specific staffing alternatives.

A better way is to employ a staff augmentation agency that will tailor work agreements to fit your business requirements and organizational targets.

Similarly, assessing your business's development environment, ensuring that you have access to outstanding technical talent whenever you need the most.

Assess your staffing needs

What kind of experience does your staff want help with? It is crucial to reply at first sight when you begin seeking for creative experience to fulfill specific skill gaps.

But the point here is not all businesses will have the same augmented staffing needs or requirements. Whether you're trying to find a product designer or applications engineer or may even be a web copywriter or virtual assistant for certain phases, you'll want to gauge your company's staffing requirements.

Consult with your HR manager, executives, and employees to find an overview of where you want to add particular skill sets, in addition to on a project-by-project foundation.

Staffing partner's expertise and experience

A client testimonial or a work history is the very first and most vital thing to ascertain an augmentation company's status. You may have a basic grasp from the site and through third party review sites. Here are the couple of points you should be aware of while choosing an augmentation firm based on expertise and experience:

Mindfully review a staffing agency's portfolio and credentials.

Consult with preceding clients and measure their levels of satisfaction with the services provided.

Ask around colleagues, reputable business partners, professionals on your related industry to learn how past customers perceive your potential staffing provider.

Technical skills

Any enhancement firm needs to have a clear grasp of the essence of the undertaking and its requirements. Many companies agree to a project to close the deal without having the necessary skillsets. Having an agreement without understanding the requirement can cause an issue with project deliverables and work quality.

The fantastic idea is to run additional interviews involving tech teams and senior staff members and project managers to understand their technical abilities better. Another tip would be to ask the staffing company how they function and how the dispersed team will incorporate into your work culture.

Evaluate Local and International Market Reach

Let us say your tech department is in dire need of an Internet Analytics Developer to help diagnose and solve issues, such as web page tagging or the use of feeds. But your company lacks such a rare kind of skill set, and you want to employ as quickly as possible for your conclusion of this project.

In such a case, you are going to have to associate with a staff augmentation firm that has the collaboration, experience, and resources already in place to recruit, employ and manage remote staff -- irrespective of place -- as per the project requirement.

Your staffing provider's communication is a crucial for on-time project deliverables. Is it true that your staffing supplier address a query with staff members, such as?

Do team members communicate effectively with providers to make certain everything is going as per expectation?

How frequently do they provide project updates?

Do you get reports after the conclusion of the task?

A transparent communication philosophy will also strengthen an uninterrupted workflow and keep both parties up to date before finishing the jobs. Thus, on-time communication doctrine will allow you to manage the company process, the team's operation and give you the capability to tackle challenges each time they arise.

Finally, look for a business with object-oriented communicating protocols that maintain clients and project managers up to date--no matter time zone/locations.

Cultural and language Differences

Any firms working with a remote team should make certain there is a cultural and language compatibility involving in-house team members with outsourced creative ability from different cultural backgrounds. Ensure yourself while working with a staffing service that will evaluate your inner business background and provide you with staffing solutions. It makes sense to utilize a dispersed team located in Mandarin-speaking countries (assuming they have the right skill sets you're searching for).

Augmenting such a team could provide you a cost-effective staffing alternative and establish effective client/remote worker communication channels. Even more, offshore workers could still gain from working with technical talent and can quickly accommodate within a short time period. Any company should be certain when partnering with a staffing service that provides clear and transparent plans, mechanics, and a workflow to get an ongoing undertaking.

Job deliverables & reporting

Make sure to collaborate with an organization that is prepared and prepared to provide oversight and transparency of the workflow. As an example, a dedicated project manager can outline a plan which contains the expected project hours for your project deliverables.

Additional Reading: Staff Augmentation VS Project Outsourcing: What to Select?

Wrapping Up

The point is that you will need to collaborate with a staffing partner that is suitable for the company's staffing requirements. To Discover a staffing agency which perfectly fits your company's outsourcing needs here's summed up things you need to determine first:

Evaluating contract procedures

Assess Your Organization's staffing needs

Investigating an outsourcing agency's global reach

Communication Techniques

In case you're looking for a staff enhancement provider to your business, look no more! Our distributed team is equally as dedicated as your internal team to find the task finished.

Aside from staff augmentation solutions, we also provide software development services, web, and mobile program development solutions together with the mission to create every business better by understanding its own requirement and supplying a custom made system or technical alternative.

Are you Looking For Software Project Management then Wolfmatrix is there to give your best product of the town.

[warninggraphiccontent]

21 February 2020

Lucky for some

Well, that was the reshuffle that was. We've summarised the whole thing in 13 charts over on the Institute for Government live blog.

Exact ministerial portfolios are still being parcelled up in most cases. Over at Cabinet Office, it may be that paymaster general Penny Mordaunt ends up with the implementation brief that covers various things digital and data, and it's unclear whether newly promoted-within-the-department Chloe Smith will keep responsibility for statistics, transparency and knowledge management. Michael Gove has taken the minister for the Cabinet Office role in place of the departing Oliver Dowden...

...who will hopefully take his enthusiasm for and expertise in digital government and data to DCMS. DCMS has helpfully published a list of its ministers' responsibilities. Caroline Dinenage gets online harms and digital tech/policy, while returning John Whittingdale gets data and the National Archives (and media - that'll be a quiet brief what with all the BBC briefing). Whittingdale was previously secretary of state at the department (before 'Digital' was added to the name), and before that, chair of the select committee scrutinising the department. This is what he told the IfG about that experience:

It was a great help because I’d done the job for 10 years, and the way select committees work is that you focus on one area and then you move to another area, so during that time I’d done inquiries into gambling, into licensing, into tourism, into heritage, into museums, arts funding, masses on press regulation, creative industries. I mean there was barely an area of the department which we hadn’t had an inquiry into... so I felt very, very familiar with almost every policy area. The only area which I didn’t know as well was the bits which were coming into the department... Because they had not previously been under the department, the select committee hadn’t looked at them, so I didn’t know those areas as well.

Helpfully, data and open government have come into the department since Whittingdale was last there, so hopefully he can get up to speed quickly. (John, if you'd like to subscribe to a newsletter that could help with that...)

Some other links:

I'm back on the IfG podcast this week - 'by popular demand', no less - talking reshuffles. But take the quiz here first - bonus quiz here.

Since it's a Six Nations weekend, here's my #dataviz from last year, when Wales were doing better than they are this time round.

And given all the recent discussions about special advisers, here's a review I did of a rather good book on that exact subject a few years ago. Still very much relevant...

Have a great weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Graphic content

UK

Government reshuffle February 2020: live blog (IfG)

More than 100 people have sat at the cabinet table during a decade of Tory rule* (The Times)

Has it really been a year? (me for IfG)

Picking winners and losers under new UK points-based immigration system* (FT)

Visa fees (IfG)

The Macroeconomic Policy Outlook Q1 2020 (Resolution Foundation)

Social capital in the UK: 2020 (ONS, via Graham)

Revealed: the areas in the UK with one Airbnb for every four homes (The Guardian)

US

Donald Trump is appointing federal judges at a blistering pace* (The Economist)

Bloomberg’s immense spending gets him 30,000 online ads a minute, and a whole lot more* (Washington Post)

Mike Bloomberg Is Way Richer Than People Realize (Mother Jones)

What the Democratic Candidates Discussed During the Debates: Annotated Transcripts* (Bloomberg)

We Checked the Iowa Caucus Math. Here’s Where It Didn’t Add Up.* (New York Times)

Coronavirus

Speed Science: The risks of swiftly spreading coronavirus research (Reuters)

Under China’s lockdown, millions have nowhere to go (Reuters)

24 hours of China region airplane movements on a normal Friday in November 2019 (UTC time) vs last Friday the 14th Feb, 2020 (via @trumpery45)

How epidemics like COVID-19 end (and how to end them faster)* (Washington Post)

Diseases like covid-19 are deadlier in non-democracies* (The Economist)

Climate and environment

Climate Change Rises as a Public Priority. But It’s More Partisan Than Ever.* (New York Times)

How to reduce your food’s carbon footprint, in 2 charts (Vox)

Revealed: The pesticide giants making billions on toxic and bee-harming chemicals (Unearthed)

Last chance for the climate transition* (FT)

Locust Swarms Ravaging East Africa Are the Size of Cities* (Bloomberg)

Everything else

The 2020 Sigma Awards: Winners

Do Authors Write Where They Know? (The Pudding)

When a change in series X is a telltale sign of event Y (John Burn-Murdoch)

Wealth inequality is not just limited to North versus South (Koen Van den Eeckhout)

A Future for the World’s Children? A WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission (The Lancet, via Ketaki)

Japanese newspaper uses Augmented Reality to show animated charts (via Khai)

Meta data

Europe

Shaping Europe's digital future: the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the European data strategy (European Commission)

EU softens plans for facial recognition regulation, sparks privacy backlash (New Statesman)

EU launches a bold new European Strategy for Data (techUK)

Exclusive: Google users in UK to lose EU data protection - sources (Reuters)

What does it actually mean? (Mark Scott)

Employment

The Datafication of Employment (The Century Foundation)

Automation likely to shrink civil service workforce, says Sedwill (Civil Service World)

Three-quarters of civil servants don’t trust government to involve staff in automation drive (Civil Service World)

British jobs for British robots (Politico)

Meet ARNOLD - the first robot in government communications  (Civil Service Quarterly)

AI

Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time (The Guardian)

ICO consultation on the draft AI auditing framework guidance for organisations (ICO)

The government’s approach to algorithmic decision-making is broken: here’s how to fix it (New Statesman)

Data

Our personal health history is too valuable to be harvested by the tech giants (The Observer)

Met removes hundreds from gangs matrix after breaking data laws (The Guardian)

Football Racism: No One Knows Conviction Rates – Despite Calls To Stamp It Out (Huffington Post)

A deluge of data is giving rise to a new economy* (The Economist)

A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data’ (TechCrunch, via David)

Data protection and trust at Co-op (ODI)

NHS data: Maximising its impact on the health and wealth of the United Kingdom (Institute of Global Health Innovation)

Critique (Peter Wells)

Online harms

Online Harms Deconstructed - the Initial Consultation Response (Cyberleagle)

Online harms: we welcome the government’s commitment to freedom of expression, but more action is needed on bad information (Full Fact)

Innovation

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies: Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (William Boone Bonvillian, Richard Van Atta and Patrick Windham (eds))

Is the UK Getting Innovation Right? (Nesta)

Everything else

Boring magic (Steve Messer)

A Farewell – looking back to the future through the camera lens (Part 1) (Surveillance Camera Commissioner’s Office)

Now Internet Society told to halt controversial .org sale… by its own advisory council: 'You misread the community mindset around dot-org' (The Register)

Met Office forecasters set for 'billion pound' supercomputer (BBC News)

Facebook must not be allowed to dictate how it gets regulated (Damian Collins for Wired)

Digital tools can be a useful bolster to democracy* (FT)

Superforecasting (Ed Conway)

Examining the Effectiveness of Current Information Laws and Implementation Practices for Accountability of Outsourced Public Services (Parliamentary Affairs)

Opportunities

JOB: Head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (HMT)

Deadline for applications to head OBR extended by Treasury (Civil Service World)

JOB: Evidence Assistant (Centre for Ageing Better, via Emily)

JOB: Senior Web Engineer - Data Visualization (Bloomberg)

EVENT: The death of anonymity in the age of identity (National Archives)

CONSULTATION: Improving patient safety by bringing private healthcare and NHS information together into NHS systems (NHS Digital)

conveRt to R: the short course (Chris Hanretty)

And finally...

It takes such a long time to get an FOI back from a govt dept these days but boy are they worth the wait (Ellen Coyne, via Sukh)

Neal.fun (via Benoit)

The Times (UK) has an entire leader premised on a statistic that nearly 1/2 of all flights taken by men 20-45 are for stag parties... (Stanley Pignal)

1 year of purchases by 1.6M Tesco customers in London, aggregated in 5k areas, with monthly snapshots (Luca Maria Aiello, via Ketaki)

Political stature* (The Economist)

[iesflorida-blog]

AMAZON AWS VS. AZURE: MICROSOFT CEO SATYA NADELLA’S PLAN TO WIN Look out, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft is coming for you.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says a head-to-head comparison of Amazon vs. Azure will yield a clear victory for Azure. Azure is the Microsoft cloud-based computing platform and software infrastructure developed for IT professionals to build, implement, and manage applications.Interesting, Nadella’s claims aren’t just bragging rights—the numbers are out, and it seems that Microsoft is in a serious resurgence, thanks in part to their efforts to expand Azure cloud offerings.

AZURE PROFITS POINT TO ROSY PICTURE FOR 2017

GeekWire reported Microsoft quarterly profits in late January 2017 as blowing Wall Street projections out of the water. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has led the company to $26 billion in revenues, driven in part, by the acquisition of business social networking platform LinkedIn.LinkedIn both helped and hurt these numbers: According to GeekWire, the revenue contribution from the LinkedIn acquisition was $228 million, which was offset by a $100 million loss. So where does that leave Azure in comparison to AWS this year?

AWS VS. AZURE

When you do a side-by-side comparison of Amazon vs. Azure, you’ll quickly see that Microsoft is holding its own against AWS, despite the fact that AWS was first to market. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes the pace of growth will continue and exceed competitors in the near future.By the numbers, Microsoft is currently turning the heads of investors by excelling in these key areas:According to GeekWire, Office 365 commercial applications continue to expand, rising 47% over the previous quarter.Consumer consumption of Office 365 also rose to an all-time high of 24.9 million. This signifies an increase of almost one million consumer subscribers in three months.On the gaming side of the business, Xbox Live active users reached a monthly high of 55 million. That was an increase of 15% from the same time the prior year.During an investor call, the company also cited decreased expenses by 15%, in part due to lower employee-generated costs.Overall, Microsoft revenue was up by 10% last quarter.Office consumer products and cloud-based services increased 22% fro the prior quarter.Dynamics 365 cloud offerings raised revenue by 7%.Server and cloud products increased 12%.Even more startling, Azure revenue increased by 93%.But don’t think Microsoft is slowing down. It seems clear that the company is actually accelerating efforts to surpass Amazon Web Services by focusing on the latest tech craze—artificial intelligence and machine learning. According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the company is working hard to integrate advanced algorithms across all Microsoft products while pushing growth in the Azure cloud.Cloud-Tech interviewed a team of IT experts last year that suggested the following characteristics set Azure apart from AWS:Azure has better out-of-the-box functionality and a faster, more intuitive setup. This is particularly useful for small to mid-sized businesses that lack and IT staff.Both AWS and Azure have a variety of costs to fit any business. Azure pricing is more straightforward that AWS, which requires you to purchase storage separately as part of the subscription.Azure offers fixed fee helpdesk support, while AWS bills by incidence. The problem, most say, is that you can quickly increase costs if you’re a heavy user.Azure makes it easy to integrate on-premise Windows servers in the cloud for hybrid usage. The service also integrates efficiently with SQL and other Microsoft cloud services.The Microsoft cloud offering has allowed even small to mid-sized businesses to compete with enterprise organizations by allowing the same accessibility and flexibility, along with powerful tools for everything from business analytics to customer relationship management.Information technology analysts say that Microsoft’s popularity extends beyond the average user to some of the more experienced technology experts in the field of computing.

AZURE IS FOR PROGRAMMERS AND DATA SCIENTISTS

Interestingly, Azure remains the only public cloud providing deep dive capabilities for data scientist and developers including:Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), which speeds up transaction verification.Build your own Bots with Azure Bot Service.Cognitive APIs that allow you to do everything from adding emotion recognition to analyzing and processing videos in your app.Cortana intelligence machine learning powering predictive analytics across any industry.Robust hybrid options for public or private access, integrating private corporate functions with cloud-based flexibility.For many enterprise organizations, it’s the hybrid options that really tip the scales in favor of Microsoft Azure. Many IT executives have no plans currently to run everything in the cloud, but instead prefer to split applications by leveraging the benefits of hybrid models. This is an attractive option for those conservatives who prefer not to put all their “eggs in one basket.”Microsoft has prepared for this trend by creating a stronger support mechanism for hybrid cloud models. They work in close collaboration with enterprise organizations that want to deploy existing infrastructure assets while migrating some data and applications to the cloud. Microsoft Azure helps these businesses ingrate seamlessly between both models.Even the Amazon CEO acknowledged in Fortune last year that they need to catch up in this area. This includes expanding in the IoT (Internet of Things) and machine learning, something that developers say truly sets Microsoft apart from the rest of the cloud providers.When you start stacking service against service, it becomes clearer why Microsoft is nipping at the heels of AWS. But what are the ramifications for your particular business model?

CORPORATE IMPACT OF MICROSOFT AZURE PAAS

 Research giant Forrester Consulting studied the economic impact of Microsoft Azure platform as a service (PaaS) In June 2016. The company analyzed what could happen when an enterprise organization shifted to Azure in a secure cloud. The goal was to determine the return on investment of moving from IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to PaaS. The study shared some startling insights into the true ROI behind going to the cloud:Azure was a time-saver for IT staff

Azure PaaS-enabled enterprise organizations to enact an 80% reduction in IT staffing management of apps deployed across the platform. The amount of time spent server patching, configuring firewalls, and setting up the network were all reduced when the enterprise went to the cloud.The cloud allowed faster overall deployment The study showed there was a 25-hour average reduction in the time it took to deploy a new application. This increased overall profit in the study group by $376,441 in the first year alone.Staff reduction – Cost Savings Subsequently, IT teams can be reduced in size. In the study cohort, it was determined that organizations could save more than $600,000 annually in saved staffing costs.Increased new business opportunities New and migrated apps in the Azure cloud allowed for vertical and new business streams. Significantly, the study noted that the time to market was typically less when deployed in the cloud.The study concluded that there was a considerable overall cost reduction associated with a cloud deployment, especially, when compared to on-site infrastructure development. Cloud options allow small companies to avoid the cost of buying, setting up, and maintaining an on-premise deployment. The cloud is flexible, able to adjust to almost immediate growth or a reduction in the need for services, all of which may happen quickly in a small business.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR MICROSOFT PAAS?

Redmond Magazine has joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in predicting big things for Microsoft Azure’s cloud-model. They are projected to hit a $20 billion annual run rate in the commercial cloud by 2018. Mary Jo Foley in her January 2017 article says:Microsoft will continue to make a lot of noise around hybrid cloud, bots, voice input and extended reality in the coming year. Like its competitors, Microsoft will tie almost every product and service development back to AI and machine learning. But the real buzz among business users will be around much more mundane, real-world products and services, such as LinkedIn integrations, Dynamics 365 ERP/CRM and SQL Server on Linux.Most pundits agree that Microsoft will continue to expand integration across consumer applications such as OneDrive and Skype. Virtual and augmented reality along with machine learning will continue to take center stage this year.Cloud adoption will increase exponentially this year, with enterprise level organizations finally accelerating their transition to the cloud or hybrid models. Gartner suggests that more than $1 trillion worldwide will be affected by this massive migration. Everyone agrees Microsoft Azure is uniquely positioned to be the PaaS of choice for these migrations. 

ARE YOU READY -- MICROSOFT AZURE?

Internet eBusiness Solutions has been helping business customers migrate to Microsoft Azure for years. We have more than 14 years experience in on-premise, cloud, and hybrid models. IES is one of the leading Microsoft Dynamics software resellers and developers. We specialize in Microsoft Dynamics GP, CRM, NAVE and Sharepoint and can help you design and implement a solution for your business no matter what size our industry you’re in. Contact us and join the thousands of other companies we’ve helped take advantage of Microsoft’s excellent PaaS offerings.

[mariaaklnthony]

Working with External User Researchers: Part I

You’ve got an idea or perhaps some rough sketches, or you have a fully formed product nearing launch. Or maybe you’ve launched it already. Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle, you know you need to get input from users.

You have a few sound options to get this input: use a full-time user researcher or contract out the work (or maybe a combination of both). Between the three of us, we’ve run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Through our different perspectives, we hope to provide some helpful considerations.

Should you hire an external user researcher?

First things first–in this article, we focus on contracting external user researchers, meaning that a person or team is brought on for the duration of a contract to conduct the research. Here are the most common situations where we find this type of role:

Organizations without researchers on staff: It would be great if companies validated their work with users during every iteration. But unfortunately, in real-world projects, user research happens at less frequent intervals, meaning there might not be enough work to justify hiring a full-time researcher. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to use external people as needed.

Organizations whose research staff is maxed out: In other cases, particularly with large companies, there may already be user researchers on the payroll. Sometimes these researchers are specific to a particular effort, and other times the researchers themselves function as internal consultants, helping out with research across multiple projects. Either way, there is a finite amount of research staff, and sometimes the staff gets overbooked. These companies may then pull in additional contract-based researchers to independently run particular projects or to provide support to full-time researchers.

Organizations that need special expertise: Even if a company does have user research on staff and those researchers have time, it’s possible that there are specialized kinds of user research for which an external contract-based researcher is brought on. For example, they may want to do research with representative users who regularly use screen readers, so they bring in an accessibility expert who also has user research skills. Or they might need a researcher with special quantitative skills for a certain project.

Why hire an external researcher vs. other options?

Designers as researchers: You could hire a full-time designer who also has research skills. But a designer usually won’t have the same level of research expertise as a dedicated researcher. Additionally, they may end up researching their own designs, making it extremely difficult to moderate test sessions without any form of bias.

Product managers as researchers: While it’s common for enthusiastic product managers to want to conduct their own guerilla user research, this is often a bad idea. Product managers tend to hear feedback that validates their ideas and most often aren’t trained on how to ask non-leading questions.

Temporary roles: You could also bring on a researcher in a staff augmentation role, meaning someone who works for you full-time for an extended period of time, but who is not considered a full-time employee. This can be a bit harder to justify. For example, there may be legal requirements that you’d have to pass if you directly contract an individual. Or you could find someone through a staffing agency–fewer legal hurdles, but likely far pricier.

If these options don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, hiring an external user researcher on a project-specific basis could be the best solution for you. They give you exactly what you need without additional commitment or other risks. They may be a freelancer (or a slightly larger microbusiness), or even a team farmed out for a particular project by a consulting firm or agency.

What kinds of projects would you contract a user researcher for?

You can reasonably expect that anyone or any company that advertises their skillset as user research likely can do the full scope of qualitative efforts��from usability studies of all kinds, to card sorts, to ethnographic and exploratory work.

Contracting out quantitative work is a bit riskier. An analogy that comes to mind is using TurboTax to file your taxes. While TurboTax may be just fine for many situations, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know in terms of more complicated tax regulations, which can quickly get you in trouble. Similarly, with quantitative work, there’s a long list of diverse, specialized quantitative skills (e.g., logs analysis, conjoint, Kano, and multiple regression). Don’t assume someone advertising as a general quantitative user researcher has the exact skills you need.

Also, for some companies, quantitative work comes with unique user privacy considerations that can require special internal permissions from legal and privacy teams.

But if the topic of your project is pretty easy to grasp and absorb without needing much specialized technical or organizational insight, hiring an external researcher is generally a great option.

What are the benefits to hiring an external researcher?

A new, objective perspective is one major benefit to hiring an external researcher. We all suffer from design fixation and are influenced by organizational politics and perceived or real technical constraints. Hiring an unbiased external researcher can uncover more unexpected issues and opportunities.

Contracting a researcher can also expand an internal researcher’s ability to influence. Having someone else moderate research studies frees up in-house researchers to be part of the conversations among stakeholders that happen while user interviews are being observed. If they are intuitively aware of an issue or opportunity, they can emphasize their perspective during those critical, decision-making moments that they often miss out on when they moderate studies themselves. In these situations, the in-house team can even design the study plan, draft the discussion guide, and just have the contractor moderate the study. The external researcher may then collaborate with the in-house researcher on the final report.

More candid and honest feedback can come out of hiring an external researcher. Research participants tend to be more comfortable sharing more critical feedback with someone who doesn’t work for the company whose product is being tested.

Lastly, if you need access to specialized research equipment or software (for example, proprietary online research tools), it can be easier to get it via an external researcher.

How do I hire an external user researcher?

So you’ve decided that you need to bring on an external user researcher to your team. How do you get started?

Where to find them

Network: Don’t wait until you need help to start networking and collecting a list of external researchers. Be proactive. Go to UX events in your local region. You’ll meet consultants and freelancers at those events, as well as people who have contracted out research and can make recommendations. You won’t necessarily have the opportunity for deep conversations, but you can continue a discussion over coffee or drinks!

Referrals: Along those same lines, when you anticipate a need at some point in the future, seek out trusted UX colleagues at your company and elsewhere. Ask them to connect you with people that they may have worked with.

What about a request for proposal (RFP)?

Your company may require you to specify your need in the form of an RFP, which is a document that outlines your project needs and specifications, and asks for bids in response.

An RFP provides these benefits:

It keeps the playing field level, and anyone who wants to bid on a project can (in theory).

You can be very specific about what you’re looking for, and get bids that can be easy to compare on price.

On the other hand, an RFP comes with limitations:

You may think your requirements were very specific, but respondents may interpret them in different ways. This can result in large quote differences.

You may be eliminating smaller players—those freelancers and microbusinesses who may be able to give you the highest level of seniority for the dollar but don’t have the staff to respond to RFPs quickly.

You may be forced to be very concrete about your needs when you are not yet sure what you’ll actually need.

When it comes to RFPs, the most important thing to remember is to clearly and thoroughly specify your needs. Don’t forget to include small but important details that can matter in terms of pricing, such as answers to these questions:

Who is responsible for recruitment of research participants?

How many participants do you want included?

Who will be responsible for distributing participant incentives?

Who will be responsible for localizing prototypes?

How long will sessions be?

Over how many days and locations will they be?

What is the format of expected deliverables?

Do you want full, transcribed videos, or video clips?

It’s these details that will ultimately result in receiving informed proposals that are easy to compare.

Do a little digging on their backgrounds

Regardless of how you find a potential researcher, make sure you check out their credentials if you haven’t worked with them before.

At the corporate level, review the company: Google them and make sure that user research seems to be one of their core competencies. The same is true when dealing with a freelancer or microbusiness: Google them and see whether you get research-oriented results, and also check them out on social media.

Certainly feel free to ask for references if you don’t already have a direct connection, but take them with a grain of salt. Between the self-selecting nature of a reference, and a potential reference just trying to be nice to a friend, these can never be fully trusted.

One of the strongest indicators of experience and quality work is if a researcher has been hired by the same client for more than one project over time.

Larger agencies, individual researchers, or something in-between?

So you’ve got a solid sense of what research you need, and you’ve got several quality options to choose from. But external researchers come in all shapes and sizes, from single freelancers to very large agencies. How do you choose what’s best for your project while still evaluating the external researchers fairly?

Larger consulting firms and agencies do have some distinct advantages—namely that you’ve got a large company to back up the project. Even if one researcher isn’t available as expected (for example, if the project timeline slips), another can take their place. They also likely have a whole infrastructure for dealing with contracts like yours.

On the other hand, this larger infrastructure may add extra burden on your side. You may not know who exactly is going to be working on your project, or their level of seniority or experience. Changes in scope will likely be more involved. Larger infrastructure also likely means higher costs.

Individual (freelance) researchers also have some key advantages. You will likely have more control over contracting requirements. They are also likely to be more flexible—and less costly. In addition, if they were referred to you, you will be working with a specific resource that you can get to know over multiple projects.

Bringing on individual researchers can incur a little more risk. You will need to make sure that you can properly justify hiring an external researcher instead of an employee. (In the United States, the IRS has a variety of tests to make sure it is OK.) And if your project timeline slips, you run a greater risk of losing the researcher to some other commitment without someone to replace them.

A small business, a step between an individual researcher and a large firm, has some advantages over hiring an individual. Contracting an established business may involve less red tape, and you will still have the personal touch of knowing exactly who is conducting your research.

An established business also shows a certain level of commitment, even if it’s one person. For example, a microbusiness could represent a single freelancer, but it could also involve a very small number of employees or established relationships with trusted subcontractors (or both). Whatever the configuration,  don’t expect a business of this size to have the ability to readily respond to RFPs.

The money question

Whether you solicit RFPs or get a single bid, price quotes will often differ significantly. User research is not a product but rather a customized and sophisticated effort around your needs. Here are some important things to consider:

Price quotes are a reflection of how a project is interpreted. Different researchers are going to interpret your needs in different ways. A good price quote clearly details any assumptions that are going into pricing so you can quickly see if something is misaligned.

Research teams are made up of staff with different levels of experience. A quote is going to be a reflection of the overall seniority of the team, their salaries and benefits, the cost of any business resources they use, and a reasonable profit margin for the business.

Businesses all want to make a reasonable profit, but approaches to profitability differ. Some organizations may balance having a high volume of work with less profit per project. Other organizations may take more of a boutique approach: more selectivity over projects taken on, with added flexibility to focus on those projects, but also with a higher profit margin.

Overbooked businesses provide higher quotes. Some consultants and agencies are in the practice of rarely saying no to a request, even if they are at capacity in terms of their workload. In these instances, it can be a common practice to multiply a quote by as much as three—if you say no, no harm done given they’re at capacity. However, if you say yes, the substantial profit is worth the cost for them to hire additional resources and to work temporarily above capacity in the meantime.

To determine whether a researcher or research team is right for you, you’ll certainly need to look at the big picture, including pricing, associated assumptions, and the seniority and background of the individuals who are doing the work.

Remember, it’s always OK to negotiate

If you have a researcher or research team that you want to work with but their pricing isn’t in line with your budget, let them know. It could be that the quote is just based on faulty assumptions. They may expect you to negotiate and are willing to come down in price; they may also offer alternative, cheaper options with them.

Next steps

Hiring an external user researcher typically brings a long list of benefits. But like most relationships, you’ll need to invest time and effort to foster a healthy working dynamic between you, your external user researcher, and your team. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll focus on how to collaborate together.

http://ift.tt/2B5ObyZ

[aracecvliwest]

Working with External User Researchers: Part I

You’ve got an idea or perhaps some rough sketches, or you have a fully formed product nearing launch. Or maybe you’ve launched it already. Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle, you know you need to get input from users.

You have a few sound options to get this input: use a full-time user researcher or contract out the work (or maybe a combination of both). Between the three of us, we’ve run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Through our different perspectives, we hope to provide some helpful considerations.

Should you hire an external user researcher?

First things first–in this article, we focus on contracting external user researchers, meaning that a person or team is brought on for the duration of a contract to conduct the research. Here are the most common situations where we find this type of role:

Organizations without researchers on staff: It would be great if companies validated their work with users during every iteration. But unfortunately, in real-world projects, user research happens at less frequent intervals, meaning there might not be enough work to justify hiring a full-time researcher. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to use external people as needed.

Organizations whose research staff is maxed out: In other cases, particularly with large companies, there may already be user researchers on the payroll. Sometimes these researchers are specific to a particular effort, and other times the researchers themselves function as internal consultants, helping out with research across multiple projects. Either way, there is a finite amount of research staff, and sometimes the staff gets overbooked. These companies may then pull in additional contract-based researchers to independently run particular projects or to provide support to full-time researchers.

Organizations that need special expertise: Even if a company does have user research on staff and those researchers have time, it’s possible that there are specialized kinds of user research for which an external contract-based researcher is brought on. For example, they may want to do research with representative users who regularly use screen readers, so they bring in an accessibility expert who also has user research skills. Or they might need a researcher with special quantitative skills for a certain project.

Why hire an external researcher vs. other options?

Designers as researchers: You could hire a full-time designer who also has research skills. But a designer usually won’t have the same level of research expertise as a dedicated researcher. Additionally, they may end up researching their own designs, making it extremely difficult to moderate test sessions without any form of bias.

Product managers as researchers: While it’s common for enthusiastic product managers to want to conduct their own guerilla user research, this is often a bad idea. Product managers tend to hear feedback that validates their ideas and most often aren’t trained on how to ask non-leading questions.

Temporary roles: You could also bring on a researcher in a staff augmentation role, meaning someone who works for you full-time for an extended period of time, but who is not considered a full-time employee. This can be a bit harder to justify. For example, there may be legal requirements that you’d have to pass if you directly contract an individual. Or you could find someone through a staffing agency–fewer legal hurdles, but likely far pricier.

If these options don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, hiring an external user researcher on a project-specific basis could be the best solution for you. They give you exactly what you need without additional commitment or other risks. They may be a freelancer (or a slightly larger microbusiness), or even a team farmed out for a particular project by a consulting firm or agency.

What kinds of projects would you contract a user researcher for?

You can reasonably expect that anyone or any company that advertises their skillset as user research likely can do the full scope of qualitative efforts—from usability studies of all kinds, to card sorts, to ethnographic and exploratory work.

Contracting out quantitative work is a bit riskier. An analogy that comes to mind is using TurboTax to file your taxes. While TurboTax may be just fine for many situations, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know in terms of more complicated tax regulations, which can quickly get you in trouble. Similarly, with quantitative work, there’s a long list of diverse, specialized quantitative skills (e.g., logs analysis, conjoint, Kano, and multiple regression). Don’t assume someone advertising as a general quantitative user researcher has the exact skills you need.

Also, for some companies, quantitative work comes with unique user privacy considerations that can require special internal permissions from legal and privacy teams.

But if the topic of your project is pretty easy to grasp and absorb without needing much specialized technical or organizational insight, hiring an external researcher is generally a great option.

What are the benefits to hiring an external researcher?

A new, objective perspective is one major benefit to hiring an external researcher. We all suffer from design fixation and are influenced by organizational politics and perceived or real technical constraints. Hiring an unbiased external researcher can uncover more unexpected issues and opportunities.

Contracting a researcher can also expand an internal researcher’s ability to influence. Having someone else moderate research studies frees up in-house researchers to be part of the conversations among stakeholders that happen while user interviews are being observed. If they are intuitively aware of an issue or opportunity, they can emphasize their perspective during those critical, decision-making moments that they often miss out on when they moderate studies themselves. In these situations, the in-house team can even design the study plan, draft the discussion guide, and just have the contractor moderate the study. The external researcher may then collaborate with the in-house researcher on the final report.

More candid and honest feedback can come out of hiring an external researcher. Research participants tend to be more comfortable sharing more critical feedback with someone who doesn’t work for the company whose product is being tested.

Lastly, if you need access to specialized research equipment or software (for example, proprietary online research tools), it can be easier to get it via an external researcher.

How do I hire an external user researcher?

So you’ve decided that you need to bring on an external user researcher to your team. How do you get started?

Where to find them

Network: Don’t wait until you need help to start networking and collecting a list of external researchers. Be proactive. Go to UX events in your local region. You’ll meet consultants and freelancers at those events, as well as people who have contracted out research and can make recommendations. You won’t necessarily have the opportunity for deep conversations, but you can continue a discussion over coffee or drinks!

Referrals: Along those same lines, when you anticipate a need at some point in the future, seek out trusted UX colleagues at your company and elsewhere. Ask them to connect you with people that they may have worked with.

What about a request for proposal (RFP)?

Your company may require you to specify your need in the form of an RFP, which is a document that outlines your project needs and specifications, and asks for bids in response.

An RFP provides these benefits:

It keeps the playing field level, and anyone who wants to bid on a project can (in theory).

You can be very specific about what you’re looking for, and get bids that can be easy to compare on price.

On the other hand, an RFP comes with limitations:

You may think your requirements were very specific, but respondents may interpret them in different ways. This can result in large quote differences.

You may be eliminating smaller players—those freelancers and microbusinesses who may be able to give you the highest level of seniority for the dollar but don’t have the staff to respond to RFPs quickly.

You may be forced to be very concrete about your needs when you are not yet sure what you’ll actually need.

When it comes to RFPs, the most important thing to remember is to clearly and thoroughly specify your needs. Don’t forget to include small but important details that can matter in terms of pricing, such as answers to these questions:

Who is responsible for recruitment of research participants?

How many participants do you want included?

Who will be responsible for distributing participant incentives?

Who will be responsible for localizing prototypes?

How long will sessions be?

Over how many days and locations will they be?

What is the format of expected deliverables?

Do you want full, transcribed videos, or video clips?

It’s these details that will ultimately result in receiving informed proposals that are easy to compare.

Do a little digging on their backgrounds

Regardless of how you find a potential researcher, make sure you check out their credentials if you haven’t worked with them before.

At the corporate level, review the company: Google them and make sure that user research seems to be one of their core competencies. The same is true when dealing with a freelancer or microbusiness: Google them and see whether you get research-oriented results, and also check them out on social media.

Certainly feel free to ask for references if you don’t already have a direct connection, but take them with a grain of salt. Between the self-selecting nature of a reference, and a potential reference just trying to be nice to a friend, these can never be fully trusted.

One of the strongest indicators of experience and quality work is if a researcher has been hired by the same client for more than one project over time.

Larger agencies, individual researchers, or something in-between?

So you’ve got a solid sense of what research you need, and you’ve got several quality options to choose from. But external researchers come in all shapes and sizes, from single freelancers to very large agencies. How do you choose what’s best for your project while still evaluating the external researchers fairly?

Larger consulting firms and agencies do have some distinct advantages—namely that you’ve got a large company to back up the project. Even if one researcher isn’t available as expected (for example, if the project timeline slips), another can take their place. They also likely have a whole infrastructure for dealing with contracts like yours.

On the other hand, this larger infrastructure may add extra burden on your side. You may not know who exactly is going to be working on your project, or their level of seniority or experience. Changes in scope will likely be more involved. Larger infrastructure also likely means higher costs.

Individual (freelance) researchers also have some key advantages. You will likely have more control over contracting requirements. They are also likely to be more flexible—and less costly. In addition, if they were referred to you, you will be working with a specific resource that you can get to know over multiple projects.

Bringing on individual researchers can incur a little more risk. You will need to make sure that you can properly justify hiring an external researcher instead of an employee. (In the United States, the IRS has a variety of tests to make sure it is OK.) And if your project timeline slips, you run a greater risk of losing the researcher to some other commitment without someone to replace them.

A small business, a step between an individual researcher and a large firm, has some advantages over hiring an individual. Contracting an established business may involve less red tape, and you will still have the personal touch of knowing exactly who is conducting your research.

An established business also shows a certain level of commitment, even if it’s one person. For example, a microbusiness could represent a single freelancer, but it could also involve a very small number of employees or established relationships with trusted subcontractors (or both). Whatever the configuration,  don’t expect a business of this size to have the ability to readily respond to RFPs.

The money question

Whether you solicit RFPs or get a single bid, price quotes will often differ significantly. User research is not a product but rather a customized and sophisticated effort around your needs. Here are some important things to consider:

Price quotes are a reflection of how a project is interpreted. Different researchers are going to interpret your needs in different ways. A good price quote clearly details any assumptions that are going into pricing so you can quickly see if something is misaligned.

Research teams are made up of staff with different levels of experience. A quote is going to be a reflection of the overall seniority of the team, their salaries and benefits, the cost of any business resources they use, and a reasonable profit margin for the business.

Businesses all want to make a reasonable profit, but approaches to profitability differ. Some organizations may balance having a high volume of work with less profit per project. Other organizations may take more of a boutique approach: more selectivity over projects taken on, with added flexibility to focus on those projects, but also with a higher profit margin.

Overbooked businesses provide higher quotes. Some consultants and agencies are in the practice of rarely saying no to a request, even if they are at capacity in terms of their workload. In these instances, it can be a common practice to multiply a quote by as much as three—if you say no, no harm done given they’re at capacity. However, if you say yes, the substantial profit is worth the cost for them to hire additional resources and to work temporarily above capacity in the meantime.

To determine whether a researcher or research team is right for you, you’ll certainly need to look at the big picture, including pricing, associated assumptions, and the seniority and background of the individuals who are doing the work.

Remember, it’s always OK to negotiate

If you have a researcher or research team that you want to work with but their pricing isn’t in line with your budget, let them know. It could be that the quote is just based on faulty assumptions. They may expect you to negotiate and are willing to come down in price; they may also offer alternative, cheaper options with them.

Next steps

Hiring an external user researcher typically brings a long list of benefits. But like most relationships, you’ll need to invest time and effort to foster a healthy working dynamic between you, your external user researcher, and your team. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll focus on how to collaborate together.

http://ift.tt/2B5ObyZ

[jeanshesallenberger]

Working with External User Researchers: Part I

You’ve got an idea or perhaps some rough sketches, or you have a fully formed product nearing launch. Or maybe you’ve launched it already. Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle, you know you need to get input from users.

You have a few sound options to get this input: use a full-time user researcher or contract out the work (or maybe a combination of both). Between the three of us, we’ve run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Through our different perspectives, we hope to provide some helpful considerations.

Should you hire an external user researcher?

First things first–in this article, we focus on contracting external user researchers, meaning that a person or team is brought on for the duration of a contract to conduct the research. Here are the most common situations where we find this type of role:

Organizations without researchers on staff: It would be great if companies validated their work with users during every iteration. But unfortunately, in real-world projects, user research happens at less frequent intervals, meaning there might not be enough work to justify hiring a full-time researcher. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to use external people as needed.

Organizations whose research staff is maxed out: In other cases, particularly with large companies, there may already be user researchers on the payroll. Sometimes these researchers are specific to a particular effort, and other times the researchers themselves function as internal consultants, helping out with research across multiple projects. Either way, there is a finite amount of research staff, and sometimes the staff gets overbooked. These companies may then pull in additional contract-based researchers to independently run particular projects or to provide support to full-time researchers.

Organizations that need special expertise: Even if a company does have user research on staff and those researchers have time, it’s possible that there are specialized kinds of user research for which an external contract-based researcher is brought on. For example, they may want to do research with representative users who regularly use screen readers, so they bring in an accessibility expert who also has user research skills. Or they might need a researcher with special quantitative skills for a certain project.

Why hire an external researcher vs. other options?

Designers as researchers: You could hire a full-time designer who also has research skills. But a designer usually won’t have the same level of research expertise as a dedicated researcher. Additionally, they may end up researching their own designs, making it extremely difficult to moderate test sessions without any form of bias.

Product managers as researchers: While it’s common for enthusiastic product managers to want to conduct their own guerilla user research, this is often a bad idea. Product managers tend to hear feedback that validates their ideas and most often aren’t trained on how to ask non-leading questions.

Temporary roles: You could also bring on a researcher in a staff augmentation role, meaning someone who works for you full-time for an extended period of time, but who is not considered a full-time employee. This can be a bit harder to justify. For example, there may be legal requirements that you’d have to pass if you directly contract an individual. Or you could find someone through a staffing agency–fewer legal hurdles, but likely far pricier.

If these options don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, hiring an external user researcher on a project-specific basis could be the best solution for you. They give you exactly what you need without additional commitment or other risks. They may be a freelancer (or a slightly larger microbusiness), or even a team farmed out for a particular project by a consulting firm or agency.

What kinds of projects would you contract a user researcher for?

You can reasonably expect that anyone or any company that advertises their skillset as user research likely can do the full scope of qualitative efforts—from usability studies of all kinds, to card sorts, to ethnographic and exploratory work.

Contracting out quantitative work is a bit riskier. An analogy that comes to mind is using TurboTax to file your taxes. While TurboTax may be just fine for many situations, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know in terms of more complicated tax regulations, which can quickly get you in trouble. Similarly, with quantitative work, there’s a long list of diverse, specialized quantitative skills (e.g., logs analysis, conjoint, Kano, and multiple regression). Don’t assume someone advertising as a general quantitative user researcher has the exact skills you need.

Also, for some companies, quantitative work comes with unique user privacy considerations that can require special internal permissions from legal and privacy teams.

But if the topic of your project is pretty easy to grasp and absorb without needing much specialized technical or organizational insight, hiring an external researcher is generally a great option.

What are the benefits to hiring an external researcher?

A new, objective perspective is one major benefit to hiring an external researcher. We all suffer from design fixation and are influenced by organizational politics and perceived or real technical constraints. Hiring an unbiased external researcher can uncover more unexpected issues and opportunities.

Contracting a researcher can also expand an internal researcher’s ability to influence. Having someone else moderate research studies frees up in-house researchers to be part of the conversations among stakeholders that happen while user interviews are being observed. If they are intuitively aware of an issue or opportunity, they can emphasize their perspective during those critical, decision-making moments that they often miss out on when they moderate studies themselves. In these situations, the in-house team can even design the study plan, draft the discussion guide, and just have the contractor moderate the study. The external researcher may then collaborate with the in-house researcher on the final report.

More candid and honest feedback can come out of hiring an external researcher. Research participants tend to be more comfortable sharing more critical feedback with someone who doesn’t work for the company whose product is being tested.

Lastly, if you need access to specialized research equipment or software (for example, proprietary online research tools), it can be easier to get it via an external researcher.

How do I hire an external user researcher?

So you’ve decided that you need to bring on an external user researcher to your team. How do you get started?

Where to find them

Network: Don’t wait until you need help to start networking and collecting a list of external researchers. Be proactive. Go to UX events in your local region. You’ll meet consultants and freelancers at those events, as well as people who have contracted out research and can make recommendations. You won’t necessarily have the opportunity for deep conversations, but you can continue a discussion over coffee or drinks!

Referrals: Along those same lines, when you anticipate a need at some point in the future, seek out trusted UX colleagues at your company and elsewhere. Ask them to connect you with people that they may have worked with.

What about a request for proposal (RFP)?

Your company may require you to specify your need in the form of an RFP, which is a document that outlines your project needs and specifications, and asks for bids in response.

An RFP provides these benefits:

It keeps the playing field level, and anyone who wants to bid on a project can (in theory).

You can be very specific about what you’re looking for, and get bids that can be easy to compare on price.

On the other hand, an RFP comes with limitations:

You may think your requirements were very specific, but respondents may interpret them in different ways. This can result in large quote differences.

You may be eliminating smaller players—those freelancers and microbusinesses who may be able to give you the highest level of seniority for the dollar but don’t have the staff to respond to RFPs quickly.

You may be forced to be very concrete about your needs when you are not yet sure what you’ll actually need.

When it comes to RFPs, the most important thing to remember is to clearly and thoroughly specify your needs. Don’t forget to include small but important details that can matter in terms of pricing, such as answers to these questions:

Who is responsible for recruitment of research participants?

How many participants do you want included?

Who will be responsible for distributing participant incentives?

Who will be responsible for localizing prototypes?

How long will sessions be?

Over how many days and locations will they be?

What is the format of expected deliverables?

Do you want full, transcribed videos, or video clips?

It’s these details that will ultimately result in receiving informed proposals that are easy to compare.

Do a little digging on their backgrounds

Regardless of how you find a potential researcher, make sure you check out their credentials if you haven’t worked with them before.

At the corporate level, review the company: Google them and make sure that user research seems to be one of their core competencies. The same is true when dealing with a freelancer or microbusiness: Google them and see whether you get research-oriented results, and also check them out on social media.

Certainly feel free to ask for references if you don’t already have a direct connection, but take them with a grain of salt. Between the self-selecting nature of a reference, and a potential reference just trying to be nice to a friend, these can never be fully trusted.

One of the strongest indicators of experience and quality work is if a researcher has been hired by the same client for more than one project over time.

Larger agencies, individual researchers, or something in-between?

So you’ve got a solid sense of what research you need, and you’ve got several quality options to choose from. But external researchers come in all shapes and sizes, from single freelancers to very large agencies. How do you choose what’s best for your project while still evaluating the external researchers fairly?

Larger consulting firms and agencies do have some distinct advantages—namely that you’ve got a large company to back up the project. Even if one researcher isn’t available as expected (for example, if the project timeline slips), another can take their place. They also likely have a whole infrastructure for dealing with contracts like yours.

On the other hand, this larger infrastructure may add extra burden on your side. You may not know who exactly is going to be working on your project, or their level of seniority or experience. Changes in scope will likely be more involved. Larger infrastructure also likely means higher costs.

Individual (freelance) researchers also have some key advantages. You will likely have more control over contracting requirements. They are also likely to be more flexible—and less costly. In addition, if they were referred to you, you will be working with a specific resource that you can get to know over multiple projects.

Bringing on individual researchers can incur a little more risk. You will need to make sure that you can properly justify hiring an external researcher instead of an employee. (In the United States, the IRS has a variety of tests to make sure it is OK.) And if your project timeline slips, you run a greater risk of losing the researcher to some other commitment without someone to replace them.

A small business, a step between an individual researcher and a large firm, has some advantages over hiring an individual. Contracting an established business may involve less red tape, and you will still have the personal touch of knowing exactly who is conducting your research.

An established business also shows a certain level of commitment, even if it’s one person. For example, a microbusiness could represent a single freelancer, but it could also involve a very small number of employees or established relationships with trusted subcontractors (or both). Whatever the configuration,  don’t expect a business of this size to have the ability to readily respond to RFPs.

The money question

Whether you solicit RFPs or get a single bid, price quotes will often differ significantly. User research is not a product but rather a customized and sophisticated effort around your needs. Here are some important things to consider:

Price quotes are a reflection of how a project is interpreted. Different researchers are going to interpret your needs in different ways. A good price quote clearly details any assumptions that are going into pricing so you can quickly see if something is misaligned.

Research teams are made up of staff with different levels of experience. A quote is going to be a reflection of the overall seniority of the team, their salaries and benefits, the cost of any business resources they use, and a reasonable profit margin for the business.

Businesses all want to make a reasonable profit, but approaches to profitability differ. Some organizations may balance having a high volume of work with less profit per project. Other organizations may take more of a boutique approach: more selectivity over projects taken on, with added flexibility to focus on those projects, but also with a higher profit margin.

Overbooked businesses provide higher quotes. Some consultants and agencies are in the practice of rarely saying no to a request, even if they are at capacity in terms of their workload. In these instances, it can be a common practice to multiply a quote by as much as three—if you say no, no harm done given they’re at capacity. However, if you say yes, the substantial profit is worth the cost for them to hire additional resources and to work temporarily above capacity in the meantime.

To determine whether a researcher or research team is right for you, you’ll certainly need to look at the big picture, including pricing, associated assumptions, and the seniority and background of the individuals who are doing the work.

Remember, it’s always OK to negotiate

If you have a researcher or research team that you want to work with but their pricing isn’t in line with your budget, let them know. It could be that the quote is just based on faulty assumptions. They may expect you to negotiate and are willing to come down in price; they may also offer alternative, cheaper options with them.

Next steps

Hiring an external user researcher typically brings a long list of benefits. But like most relationships, you’ll need to invest time and effort to foster a healthy working dynamic between you, your external user researcher, and your team. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll focus on how to collaborate together.

http://ift.tt/2B5ObyZ

[joannlyfgnch]

Working with External User Researchers: Part I

You’ve got an idea or perhaps some rough sketches, or you have a fully formed product nearing launch. Or maybe you’ve launched it already. Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle, you know you need to get input from users.

You have a few sound options to get this input: use a full-time user researcher or contract out the work (or maybe a combination of both). Between the three of us, we’ve run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Through our different perspectives, we hope to provide some helpful considerations.

Should you hire an external user researcher?

First things first–in this article, we focus on contracting external user researchers, meaning that a person or team is brought on for the duration of a contract to conduct the research. Here are the most common situations where we find this type of role:

Organizations without researchers on staff: It would be great if companies validated their work with users during every iteration. But unfortunately, in real-world projects, user research happens at less frequent intervals, meaning there might not be enough work to justify hiring a full-time researcher. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to use external people as needed.

Organizations whose research staff is maxed out: In other cases, particularly with large companies, there may already be user researchers on the payroll. Sometimes these researchers are specific to a particular effort, and other times the researchers themselves function as internal consultants, helping out with research across multiple projects. Either way, there is a finite amount of research staff, and sometimes the staff gets overbooked. These companies may then pull in additional contract-based researchers to independently run particular projects or to provide support to full-time researchers.

Organizations that need special expertise: Even if a company does have user research on staff and those researchers have time, it’s possible that there are specialized kinds of user research for which an external contract-based researcher is brought on. For example, they may want to do research with representative users who regularly use screen readers, so they bring in an accessibility expert who also has user research skills. Or they might need a researcher with special quantitative skills for a certain project.

Why hire an external researcher vs. other options?

Designers as researchers: You could hire a full-time designer who also has research skills. But a designer usually won’t have the same level of research expertise as a dedicated researcher. Additionally, they may end up researching their own designs, making it extremely difficult to moderate test sessions without any form of bias.

Product managers as researchers: While it’s common for enthusiastic product managers to want to conduct their own guerilla user research, this is often a bad idea. Product managers tend to hear feedback that validates their ideas and most often aren’t trained on how to ask non-leading questions.

Temporary roles: You could also bring on a researcher in a staff augmentation role, meaning someone who works for you full-time for an extended period of time, but who is not considered a full-time employee. This can be a bit harder to justify. For example, there may be legal requirements that you’d have to pass if you directly contract an individual. Or you could find someone through a staffing agency–fewer legal hurdles, but likely far pricier.

If these options don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, hiring an external user researcher on a project-specific basis could be the best solution for you. They give you exactly what you need without additional commitment or other risks. They may be a freelancer (or a slightly larger microbusiness), or even a team farmed out for a particular project by a consulting firm or agency.

What kinds of projects would you contract a user researcher for?

You can reasonably expect that anyone or any company that advertises their skillset as user research likely can do the full scope of qualitative efforts—from usability studies of all kinds, to card sorts, to ethnographic and exploratory work.

Contracting out quantitative work is a bit riskier. An analogy that comes to mind is using TurboTax to file your taxes. While TurboTax may be just fine for many situations, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know in terms of more complicated tax regulations, which can quickly get you in trouble. Similarly, with quantitative work, there’s a long list of diverse, specialized quantitative skills (e.g., logs analysis, conjoint, Kano, and multiple regression). Don’t assume someone advertising as a general quantitative user researcher has the exact skills you need.

Also, for some companies, quantitative work comes with unique user privacy considerations that can require special internal permissions from legal and privacy teams.

But if the topic of your project is pretty easy to grasp and absorb without needing much specialized technical or organizational insight, hiring an external researcher is generally a great option.

What are the benefits to hiring an external researcher?

A new, objective perspective is one major benefit to hiring an external researcher. We all suffer from design fixation and are influenced by organizational politics and perceived or real technical constraints. Hiring an unbiased external researcher can uncover more unexpected issues and opportunities.

Contracting a researcher can also expand an internal researcher’s ability to influence. Having someone else moderate research studies frees up in-house researchers to be part of the conversations among stakeholders that happen while user interviews are being observed. If they are intuitively aware of an issue or opportunity, they can emphasize their perspective during those critical, decision-making moments that they often miss out on when they moderate studies themselves. In these situations, the in-house team can even design the study plan, draft the discussion guide, and just have the contractor moderate the study. The external researcher may then collaborate with the in-house researcher on the final report.

More candid and honest feedback can come out of hiring an external researcher. Research participants tend to be more comfortable sharing more critical feedback with someone who doesn’t work for the company whose product is being tested.

Lastly, if you need access to specialized research equipment or software (for example, proprietary online research tools), it can be easier to get it via an external researcher.

How do I hire an external user researcher?

So you’ve decided that you need to bring on an external user researcher to your team. How do you get started?

Where to find them

Network: Don’t wait until you need help to start networking and collecting a list of external researchers. Be proactive. Go to UX events in your local region. You’ll meet consultants and freelancers at those events, as well as people who have contracted out research and can make recommendations. You won’t necessarily have the opportunity for deep conversations, but you can continue a discussion over coffee or drinks!

Referrals: Along those same lines, when you anticipate a need at some point in the future, seek out trusted UX colleagues at your company and elsewhere. Ask them to connect you with people that they may have worked with.

What about a request for proposal (RFP)?

Your company may require you to specify your need in the form of an RFP, which is a document that outlines your project needs and specifications, and asks for bids in response.

An RFP provides these benefits:

It keeps the playing field level, and anyone who wants to bid on a project can (in theory).

You can be very specific about what you’re looking for, and get bids that can be easy to compare on price.

On the other hand, an RFP comes with limitations:

You may think your requirements were very specific, but respondents may interpret them in different ways. This can result in large quote differences.

You may be eliminating smaller players—those freelancers and microbusinesses who may be able to give you the highest level of seniority for the dollar but don’t have the staff to respond to RFPs quickly.

You may be forced to be very concrete about your needs when you are not yet sure what you’ll actually need.

When it comes to RFPs, the most important thing to remember is to clearly and thoroughly specify your needs. Don’t forget to include small but important details that can matter in terms of pricing, such as answers to these questions:

Who is responsible for recruitment of research participants?

How many participants do you want included?

Who will be responsible for distributing participant incentives?

Who will be responsible for localizing prototypes?

How long will sessions be?

Over how many days and locations will they be?

What is the format of expected deliverables?

Do you want full, transcribed videos, or video clips?

It’s these details that will ultimately result in receiving informed proposals that are easy to compare.

Do a little digging on their backgrounds

Regardless of how you find a potential researcher, make sure you check out their credentials if you haven’t worked with them before.

At the corporate level, review the company: Google them and make sure that user research seems to be one of their core competencies. The same is true when dealing with a freelancer or microbusiness: Google them and see whether you get research-oriented results, and also check them out on social media.

Certainly feel free to ask for references if you don’t already have a direct connection, but take them with a grain of salt. Between the self-selecting nature of a reference, and a potential reference just trying to be nice to a friend, these can never be fully trusted.

One of the strongest indicators of experience and quality work is if a researcher has been hired by the same client for more than one project over time.

Larger agencies, individual researchers, or something in-between?

So you’ve got a solid sense of what research you need, and you’ve got several quality options to choose from. But external researchers come in all shapes and sizes, from single freelancers to very large agencies. How do you choose what’s best for your project while still evaluating the external researchers fairly?

Larger consulting firms and agencies do have some distinct advantages—namely that you’ve got a large company to back up the project. Even if one researcher isn’t available as expected (for example, if the project timeline slips), another can take their place. They also likely have a whole infrastructure for dealing with contracts like yours.

On the other hand, this larger infrastructure may add extra burden on your side. You may not know who exactly is going to be working on your project, or their level of seniority or experience. Changes in scope will likely be more involved. Larger infrastructure also likely means higher costs.

Individual (freelance) researchers also have some key advantages. You will likely have more control over contracting requirements. They are also likely to be more flexible—and less costly. In addition, if they were referred to you, you will be working with a specific resource that you can get to know over multiple projects.

Bringing on individual researchers can incur a little more risk. You will need to make sure that you can properly justify hiring an external researcher instead of an employee. (In the United States, the IRS has a variety of tests to make sure it is OK.) And if your project timeline slips, you run a greater risk of losing the researcher to some other commitment without someone to replace them.

A small business, a step between an individual researcher and a large firm, has some advantages over hiring an individual. Contracting an established business may involve less red tape, and you will still have the personal touch of knowing exactly who is conducting your research.

An established business also shows a certain level of commitment, even if it’s one person. For example, a microbusiness could represent a single freelancer, but it could also involve a very small number of employees or established relationships with trusted subcontractors (or both). Whatever the configuration,  don’t expect a business of this size to have the ability to readily respond to RFPs.

The money question

Whether you solicit RFPs or get a single bid, price quotes will often differ significantly. User research is not a product but rather a customized and sophisticated effort around your needs. Here are some important things to consider:

Price quotes are a reflection of how a project is interpreted. Different researchers are going to interpret your needs in different ways. A good price quote clearly details any assumptions that are going into pricing so you can quickly see if something is misaligned.

Research teams are made up of staff with different levels of experience. A quote is going to be a reflection of the overall seniority of the team, their salaries and benefits, the cost of any business resources they use, and a reasonable profit margin for the business.

Businesses all want to make a reasonable profit, but approaches to profitability differ. Some organizations may balance having a high volume of work with less profit per project. Other organizations may take more of a boutique approach: more selectivity over projects taken on, with added flexibility to focus on those projects, but also with a higher profit margin.

Overbooked businesses provide higher quotes. Some consultants and agencies are in the practice of rarely saying no to a request, even if they are at capacity in terms of their workload. In these instances, it can be a common practice to multiply a quote by as much as three—if you say no, no harm done given they’re at capacity. However, if you say yes, the substantial profit is worth the cost for them to hire additional resources and to work temporarily above capacity in the meantime.

To determine whether a researcher or research team is right for you, you’ll certainly need to look at the big picture, including pricing, associated assumptions, and the seniority and background of the individuals who are doing the work.

Remember, it’s always OK to negotiate

If you have a researcher or research team that you want to work with but their pricing isn’t in line with your budget, let them know. It could be that the quote is just based on faulty assumptions. They may expect you to negotiate and are willing to come down in price; they may also offer alternative, cheaper options with them.

Next steps

Hiring an external user researcher typically brings a long list of benefits. But like most relationships, you’ll need to invest time and effort to foster a healthy working dynamic between you, your external user researcher, and your team. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll focus on how to collaborate together.

http://ift.tt/2B5ObyZ

[pattersondonaldblk5]

Working with External User Researchers: Part I

You’ve got an idea or perhaps some rough sketches, or you have a fully formed product nearing launch. Or maybe you’ve launched it already. Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle, you know you need to get input from users.

You have a few sound options to get this input: use a full-time user researcher or contract out the work (or maybe a combination of both). Between the three of us, we’ve run a user research agency, hired external researchers, and worked as freelancers. Through our different perspectives, we hope to provide some helpful considerations.

Should you hire an external user researcher?

First things first–in this article, we focus on contracting external user researchers, meaning that a person or team is brought on for the duration of a contract to conduct the research. Here are the most common situations where we find this type of role:

Organizations without researchers on staff: It would be great if companies validated their work with users during every iteration. But unfortunately, in real-world projects, user research happens at less frequent intervals, meaning there might not be enough work to justify hiring a full-time researcher. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to use external people as needed.

Organizations whose research staff is maxed out: In other cases, particularly with large companies, there may already be user researchers on the payroll. Sometimes these researchers are specific to a particular effort, and other times the researchers themselves function as internal consultants, helping out with research across multiple projects. Either way, there is a finite amount of research staff, and sometimes the staff gets overbooked. These companies may then pull in additional contract-based researchers to independently run particular projects or to provide support to full-time researchers.

Organizations that need special expertise: Even if a company does have user research on staff and those researchers have time, it’s possible that there are specialized kinds of user research for which an external contract-based researcher is brought on. For example, they may want to do research with representative users who regularly use screen readers, so they bring in an accessibility expert who also has user research skills. Or they might need a researcher with special quantitative skills for a certain project.

Why hire an external researcher vs. other options?

Designers as researchers: You could hire a full-time designer who also has research skills. But a designer usually won’t have the same level of research expertise as a dedicated researcher. Additionally, they may end up researching their own designs, making it extremely difficult to moderate test sessions without any form of bias.

Product managers as researchers: While it’s common for enthusiastic product managers to want to conduct their own guerilla user research, this is often a bad idea. Product managers tend to hear feedback that validates their ideas and most often aren’t trained on how to ask non-leading questions.

Temporary roles: You could also bring on a researcher in a staff augmentation role, meaning someone who works for you full-time for an extended period of time, but who is not considered a full-time employee. This can be a bit harder to justify. For example, there may be legal requirements that you’d have to pass if you directly contract an individual. Or you could find someone through a staffing agency–fewer legal hurdles, but likely far pricier.

If these options don’t sound like a good fit for your needs, hiring an external user researcher on a project-specific basis could be the best solution for you. They give you exactly what you need without additional commitment or other risks. They may be a freelancer (or a slightly larger microbusiness), or even a team farmed out for a particular project by a consulting firm or agency.

What kinds of projects would you contract a user researcher for?

You can reasonably expect that anyone or any company that advertises their skillset as user research likely can do the full scope of qualitative efforts—from usability studies of all kinds, to card sorts, to ethnographic and exploratory work.

Contracting out quantitative work is a bit riskier. An analogy that comes to mind is using TurboTax to file your taxes. While TurboTax may be just fine for many situations, it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know in terms of more complicated tax regulations, which can quickly get you in trouble. Similarly, with quantitative work, there’s a long list of diverse, specialized quantitative skills (e.g., logs analysis, conjoint, Kano, and multiple regression). Don’t assume someone advertising as a general quantitative user researcher has the exact skills you need.

Also, for some companies, quantitative work comes with unique user privacy considerations that can require special internal permissions from legal and privacy teams.

But if the topic of your project is pretty easy to grasp and absorb without needing much specialized technical or organizational insight, hiring an external researcher is generally a great option.

What are the benefits to hiring an external researcher?

A new, objective perspective is one major benefit to hiring an external researcher. We all suffer from design fixation and are influenced by organizational politics and perceived or real technical constraints. Hiring an unbiased external researcher can uncover more unexpected issues and opportunities.

Contracting a researcher can also expand an internal researcher’s ability to influence. Having someone else moderate research studies frees up in-house researchers to be part of the conversations among stakeholders that happen while user interviews are being observed. If they are intuitively aware of an issue or opportunity, they can emphasize their perspective during those critical, decision-making moments that they often miss out on when they moderate studies themselves. In these situations, the in-house team can even design the study plan, draft the discussion guide, and just have the contractor moderate the study. The external researcher may then collaborate with the in-house researcher on the final report.

More candid and honest feedback can come out of hiring an external researcher. Research participants tend to be more comfortable sharing more critical feedback with someone who doesn’t work for the company whose product is being tested.

Lastly, if you need access to specialized research equipment or software (for example, proprietary online research tools), it can be easier to get it via an external researcher.

How do I hire an external user researcher?

So you’ve decided that you need to bring on an external user researcher to your team. How do you get started?

Where to find them

Network: Don’t wait until you need help to start networking and collecting a list of external researchers. Be proactive. Go to UX events in your local region. You’ll meet consultants and freelancers at those events, as well as people who have contracted out research and can make recommendations. You won’t necessarily have the opportunity for deep conversations, but you can continue a discussion over coffee or drinks!

Referrals: Along those same lines, when you anticipate a need at some point in the future, seek out trusted UX colleagues at your company and elsewhere. Ask them to connect you with people that they may have worked with.

What about a request for proposal (RFP)?

Your company may require you to specify your need in the form of an RFP, which is a document that outlines your project needs and specifications, and asks for bids in response.

An RFP provides these benefits:

It keeps the playing field level, and anyone who wants to bid on a project can (in theory).

You can be very specific about what you’re looking for, and get bids that can be easy to compare on price.

On the other hand, an RFP comes with limitations:

You may think your requirements were very specific, but respondents may interpret them in different ways. This can result in large quote differences.

You may be eliminating smaller players—those freelancers and microbusinesses who may be able to give you the highest level of seniority for the dollar but don’t have the staff to respond to RFPs quickly.

You may be forced to be very concrete about your needs when you are not yet sure what you’ll actually need.

When it comes to RFPs, the most important thing to remember is to clearly and thoroughly specify your needs. Don’t forget to include small but important details that can matter in terms of pricing, such as answers to these questions:

Who is responsible for recruitment of research participants?

How many participants do you want included?

Who will be responsible for distributing participant incentives?

Who will be responsible for localizing prototypes?

How long will sessions be?

Over how many days and locations will they be?

What is the format of expected deliverables?

Do you want full, transcribed videos, or video clips?

It’s these details that will ultimately result in receiving informed proposals that are easy to compare.

Do a little digging on their backgrounds

Regardless of how you find a potential researcher, make sure you check out their credentials if you haven’t worked with them before.

At the corporate level, review the company: Google them and make sure that user research seems to be one of their core competencies. The same is true when dealing with a freelancer or microbusiness: Google them and see whether you get research-oriented results, and also check them out on social media.

Certainly feel free to ask for references if you don’t already have a direct connection, but take them with a grain of salt. Between the self-selecting nature of a reference, and a potential reference just trying to be nice to a friend, these can never be fully trusted.

One of the strongest indicators of experience and quality work is if a researcher has been hired by the same client for more than one project over time.

Larger agencies, individual researchers, or something in-between?

So you’ve got a solid sense of what research you need, and you’ve got several quality options to choose from. But external researchers come in all shapes and sizes, from single freelancers to very large agencies. How do you choose what’s best for your project while still evaluating the external researchers fairly?

Larger consulting firms and agencies do have some distinct advantages—namely that you’ve got a large company to back up the project. Even if one researcher isn’t available as expected (for example, if the project timeline slips), another can take their place. They also likely have a whole infrastructure for dealing with contracts like yours.

On the other hand, this larger infrastructure may add extra burden on your side. You may not know who exactly is going to be working on your project, or their level of seniority or experience. Changes in scope will likely be more involved. Larger infrastructure also likely means higher costs.

Individual (freelance) researchers also have some key advantages. You will likely have more control over contracting requirements. They are also likely to be more flexible—and less costly. In addition, if they were referred to you, you will be working with a specific resource that you can get to know over multiple projects.

Bringing on individual researchers can incur a little more risk. You will need to make sure that you can properly justify hiring an external researcher instead of an employee. (In the United States, the IRS has a variety of tests to make sure it is OK.) And if your project timeline slips, you run a greater risk of losing the researcher to some other commitment without someone to replace them.

A small business, a step between an individual researcher and a large firm, has some advantages over hiring an individual. Contracting an established business may involve less red tape, and you will still have the personal touch of knowing exactly who is conducting your research.

An established business also shows a certain level of commitment, even if it’s one person. For example, a microbusiness could represent a single freelancer, but it could also involve a very small number of employees or established relationships with trusted subcontractors (or both). Whatever the configuration,  don’t expect a business of this size to have the ability to readily respond to RFPs.

The money question

Whether you solicit RFPs or get a single bid, price quotes will often differ significantly. User research is not a product but rather a customized and sophisticated effort around your needs. Here are some important things to consider:

Price quotes are a reflection of how a project is interpreted. Different researchers are going to interpret your needs in different ways. A good price quote clearly details any assumptions that are going into pricing so you can quickly see if something is misaligned.

Research teams are made up of staff with different levels of experience. A quote is going to be a reflection of the overall seniority of the team, their salaries and benefits, the cost of any business resources they use, and a reasonable profit margin for the business.

Businesses all want to make a reasonable profit, but approaches to profitability differ. Some organizations may balance having a high volume of work with less profit per project. Other organizations may take more of a boutique approach: more selectivity over projects taken on, with added flexibility to focus on those projects, but also with a higher profit margin.

Overbooked businesses provide higher quotes. Some consultants and agencies are in the practice of rarely saying no to a request, even if they are at capacity in terms of their workload. In these instances, it can be a common practice to multiply a quote by as much as three—if you say no, no harm done given they’re at capacity. However, if you say yes, the substantial profit is worth the cost for them to hire additional resources and to work temporarily above capacity in the meantime.

To determine whether a researcher or research team is right for you, you’ll certainly need to look at the big picture, including pricing, associated assumptions, and the seniority and background of the individuals who are doing the work.

Remember, it’s always OK to negotiate

If you have a researcher or research team that you want to work with but their pricing isn’t in line with your budget, let them know. It could be that the quote is just based on faulty assumptions. They may expect you to negotiate and are willing to come down in price; they may also offer alternative, cheaper options with them.

Next steps

Hiring an external user researcher typically brings a long list of benefits. But like most relationships, you’ll need to invest time and effort to foster a healthy working dynamic between you, your external user researcher, and your team. Stay tuned for the next installment, where we’ll focus on how to collaborate together.

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Careful Buying Life Insurance as Fiduciary Rule Takes Effect

Should you buy life insurance to fund or augment your retirement savings? Life insurance retirement-planning solutions make sense for some, but they are not right for everyone. However, more people may be faced with that question, thanks to recent news from the Department of Labor.

SEE ALSO: Don’t Get Hung Up on Fiduciary Rule’s Fate; Focus Should Be on Planning

Emerging from a months-long regulatory ping-pong match, the DOL’s fiduciary rule is now scheduled to take effect on June 9, 2017, according to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta. The Trump administration had issued an executive order that delayed the rule, but Acosta wrote that there was nothing to stop the rule from being implemented.

During this regulatory back and forth, many brokers and investment professionals had already re-evaluated what products they will recommend to clients in the future. They will no longer be selling expensive, and well-paying (for them, of course), variable annuities. Additionally, many investment options being introduced will pay them on a fee basis rather than a commission basis, so investors’ retirement savings could take a hit as the fees add up over time.

As a result of these firms switching their models, they may be recommending life insurance products more often as a retirement-planning tool.

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So, if your financial adviser or a life insurance salesperson ever presents this as an option, proceed with caution, because it might not fit your needs. Life insurance and retirement-savings plans generally have two separate purposes. Retirement planning funds your life post-work; most life insurance policies fund your loved ones’ lives — post you.

Life Insurance Pros

There are two primary types of life insurance: term life insurance and whole life insurance. Term life insurance provides coverage for a specific time period, and has a specific premium that is decided based on the age and health of the insured. Term life insurance is also called “pure” life insurance because its only purpose is to insure against death — it generally does not accumulate additional value and is designed to financially protect dependents in the case of a policyholder’s premature death.

On the other hand, so-called whole or permanent life insurance (permanent if payments continue or it is fully funded) contains a life insurance death benefit and a separate component that builds up cash value. In variable life insurance policies, the cash value is invested in sub-accounts that the policyholder is usually able to select. In indexed life insurance policies, the cash value grows based on a pre-established index.

The advantage in this type of policy is the ability to withdraw or borrow against the cash value. These are the funds that can help with your retirement, a child’s college or major home improvements. Distributions through borrowing (from yourself) are 100% tax free, vs. many other types of retirement funds. However, interest rates on these loans are high (at around 7%-8%) and failing to pay off the loans or withdrawals lowers your death benefit.

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Life insurance salespeople like to portray variable policies as the Swiss Army knives of insurance products. Future income, projected growth, tax benefits, death benefits, a fund to cover long-term care, an emergency cash fund and more.

Life Insurance Cons

There are three main negatives to using life insurance as a retirement vehicle:

The first is the cost. You are paying for the underlying insurance, which you might not need down the road. Additionally, the fees can be three to four times higher than other savings options. The costs quickly add up and will eat away at your returns. Furthermore, there is a surrender value if you change your mind in the first five to 10 years, depending on the policy. After all, the salesperson got the bulk of their commission upfront on commission-based policies.

Second, although the amount contributed for investing can vary, you must pay the premium until the policy is fully funded. But you can stop contributing to other types of retirement products, like an IRA, if you have a bad year. With a life policy, you may wind up inadvertently letting it lapse. If that happens, you lose all that you’ve contributed.

Third, it probably will not make sense in your situation to fund the life insurance, when you have not contributed the maximum to your 401(k) or IRA. You may be better off considering more traditional retirement savings options — with your tax situation in mind — before venturing into other types.

Who May Want Life Insurance – and Who May Not

Life insurance should be a consideration if you have dependents who rely on you financially. In the case of your untimely death, life insurance will ensure that your loved ones are provided for. Additionally, life insurance can cover any outstanding debts as well as costs associated with your death and funeral.

If you don’t have dependents and your finances are in good order, life insurance isn’t a necessity. It’s important to note that life insurance should not be viewed as an investment. Its primary purpose is to insure against unexpected fatality, and is therefore a form of risk management. If you are looking to save for retirement or your child’s future, there are better options than life insurance.

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Taking the Whole Picture Into Account

A financial adviser has a fiduciary responsibility, one that is being underscored with the implementation of the fiduciary rule, to recommend retirement options that are in your best interest. If an adviser suggests contributing more to life insurance than funding other retirement options, it may behoove you to get a second opinion. The same is true if they do not discuss life insurance at all. Additionally, make sure fees are outlined upfront in any discussion.

A good financial adviser starts with a holistic approach to your assets and future needs. The resulting financial plan should be a sound one based on your situation, not what may work for someone else.

See Also: Beware of These Often-Overlooked Insurance Gaps

Investing involves risk including the potential loss of principal. No investment strategy can guarantee a profit or protect against loss in periods of declining values. Opinions expressed are subject to change without notice and are not intended as investment advice or to predict future performance. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult your financial professional before making any investment decision.

Ash Toumayants is the founder of Strong Tower Associates, a retirement planning firm dedicated to helping clients in all stages of life prepare for retirement. For over a decade, he has helped hardworking people across Central Pennsylvania prepare for retirement.

Investment Advisory Services offered through Retirement Wealth Advisors, (RWA) a Registered Investment Advisor. Strong Tower Associates and RWA are not affiliated.

Comments are suppressed in compliance with industry guidelines. Click here to learn more and read more articles from the author.

This article was written by and presents the views of our contributing adviser, not the Kiplinger editorial staff. You can check adviser records with the SEC or with FINRA.

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How To Choose The Right Software For Your Business

How To Choose the Right Software for Your Business

If you having trouble finding the right software for your business, it’s likely you are not alone with this problem. It could be that there are a lack of options available to you and your particular business. Every organization is different, but commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software doesn’t always address the diversity and needs of your processes.

If you can’t find out-of-the-box software that suits your particular business needs, you have 3 options:

You can change the way you work to accommodate the new technology

You can customize the software to meet your business’ needs and processes

You can invest in custom software development that would be tailor-made to support your company, just the way you need it

There are many business processes that can benefit from custom software development. Even traditionally non-digital businesses use digital channels and automate processes with technology. For example, invoicing and accounting software is necessary for almost all businesses. These workflows are standard across most industries and organizations. Thus, there is little strategic value in those processes, so standard software is often sufficient. However, if you’re in the manufacturing industry, and your core business process differentiates you from your competitors, then it can be extremely valuable to have custom-designed software that supports the execution of those processes.

The goal is not simply to own custom software

Using custom software should improve your business. However, in some cases, simple changes to business operations are a reasonable option. In fact, many vendors build software with industrial best practices in mind, so tweaking your workflow might be a good idea. But sometimes, accommodating technology may lead to changes that are too radical, inconvenient, or would have a negative impact on your business.

If changing your processes to match new software is too disruptive, then it’s time to consider customizing an existing software solution. Not all ready-made software can be customized, and even if it can, in many cases, the changes may not be worth the cost. Furthermore, the final product may be cumbersome, and ultimately, disappointing.

Before committing to commission based,  custom-engineered software, there are some factors to consider.

ROI of Custom Software Engineering Services

While evaluating available software, you may find a vendor who meets your list of ‘must-have’ and ‘nice to have’ requirements. However, if you find yourself struggling to identify potential  service providers, don’t settle on a vendor out of frustration. Take the ROI into account before signing the contract with a vendor, since it’s important for your business to be able to benefit from your investments in the long run.

Time, Cost and Scope of Custom Software Development

There are 3 main factors to weigh when considering a packaged vs. bespoke software purchase, which are: cost, time, and scope.

First of all, you need to know what is financially feasible. It is wise to conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis of each system or vendor before making a choice. It’s also important to consider upfront and ongoing costs, as well as the long-term value and impact a system will have on your business. Then, you must take time into consideration and balance it with the cost against the scope of the project. Time concerns often drive businesses to make an investment in custom software — not just time-to-market or time-to-implement, but also the efficiency your company could gain with a tailored solution. By weighing budget, timeline, and scope against potential competitive advantages, you will be able to determine if you need custom software engineering services.

Types of Custom Software Engineering Services to Consider

Because no two businesses are alike, custom software engineering services are highly varied. There’s a custom software engineering service to meet your needs, whether you need to build a system from scratch, integrate existing systems, rescue a failing in-house project, or augment your own development and engineering staff.

Software and app development can range from an on-premise to a web to a mobile solution for your business. For example, you might need an iPhone, or Android app for your field service agents. Or maybe you want to develop that as a SaaS solution to sell. Many custom software engineering firms can build both internal business software, as well as test, prototype, and build products on behalf of your company.

Supplementary IT resources, which are often provided by software engineering firms. Whenever you have a short-term or one-off project that requires high-skilled engineers, you can use these services to augment your own IT team. Getting outside help can decrease start-up time and increase both productivity and quality of work. Some examples of additional IT resources you may want to hire on an as-needed basis include: a mobile developer, a game developer, a web developer, a Scrum master, etc.

Project rescue is necessary when your software development project is in trouble. This is where software engineering firms can step in and analyze what went wrong, and report the best methodology to reduce additional time expenses and drive the project to completion.

Enterprise solutions and integrations are complex, which is why custom ERP or CRM software may be necessary. In some cases, you may simply need a system integration. A custom software engineering services firm can address both enterprise needs.

Ongoing support is sometimes needed after a project is completed. These services include application lifecycle management (development, maintenance, management, migration) as well as support and maintenance.

  How to Choose Custom Software Engineering Services

It’s not so easy to choose a custom software engineering firm. Ideally, you should choose someone with whom you can form a long-term partnership in case any issues arise or you have future additional needs. When searching for software engineering services, here are some differentiators that will help you pinpoint what to look for when choosing your partner:

Programming Language: When selecting a service provider, find one with a wide-ranging experience in programming languages, or a team that specializes in the particular code you need, whether it’s PHP, JavaScript, etc.

Purpose:If you’re building an enterprise CRM, you’ll need a very different team from when you’re building a game. If your project is industry-specific or extremely specialized, you might want to consider choosing a niche service provider. That way, you’ll have a subject-matter expert on your side.

Business vs. Consumer: When designing software for consumers, you’ll need different knowledge and skill sets than the ones required when building a system for business users. These two projects are completely different, so it’s worth the effort to explore your options until you find a vendor with relevant experience.

Cloud or On-premise: How do you plan to deploy your software? What other applications do you need? Once you know how you implement your custom software, you will be able to narrow the market of service providers.

Add-on Services: What else does the firm offer, besides custom software development? Perhaps you may want to add IT consulting services to your project, to help you with security and risk management, or maybe you need data analysts and strategists to help you derive insights from your business data. Depending on the scope of your project and your own staff’s expertise, it won’t be a bad idea to find custom software engineering service providers that also offer complementary IT services.

As you become more and more familiar with the type of IT services you need, as well as additional specialty differentiators required for the project, you will significantly narrow down your list of service providers. It’s then up to you to put in your due diligence and check the track record of every service provider you’re considering.

from Business Opportunities http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2017/01/27/choose-right-software-business/