Nearshore software development

Recruiting and onboarding new technical staff can take months. As specialists in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, ANEGIS can offer body leasing or development team leasing for developers and technical specialists, such as systems integrators, testers and experts in cloud solutions, licensing solutions, AI, and business intelligence software.

Nearshore software development with ANEGIS

Experience

ANEGIS only lease experienced staff who are our full-time employees. Whether you require support from just one or two additional team members or an entire team of specialists with project manager to complete the project end-to-end, ANEGIS can help you identify the necessary roles and create a team ready to deliver your specifications.

Allow your people to focus on their core business area and let ANEGIS deal with managing your IT capacity and capability shortages. With extensive experience in running projects of a high degree of complexity, ANEGIS not only provide the right people necessary for success, but also the correct structure and proven methodology to support them.

Flexibility

Avoid recruitment costs and pay for technical resources only when you need them. Individuals and teams can be leased for a specific task or project phase, from requirement analysis, system design and implementation, to testing, user training, technical support and maintenance.

The ANEGIS leasing model allows significant cost optimisation without sacrificing quality. Teams can work remotely, onsite at the customer or, if preferred, in a dedicated office organised by us. Our experts are always client oriented and highly committed to their projects.

Location

Situated in the heart of Europe – only two hours direct flight from London – our experts are close to you. While Asia may lead in terms of raw costs, Europe has significant advantages in quality, reliability and compliance with data regulations and security.

Advantages of nearshoring

Geographical proximity

By definition, a nearshore location will be closer to you than an offshore one. The value of being able to sit down face-to-face with your team is often underestimated. The shorter travel times and convenience of getting to a nearshore location means this can be done more often and at lesser expense.

Time zone convenience

Collaboration with any external team is far easier when it can be done within normal business hours. Efficient and frequent communication is vital for today’s Agile software development methodologies and keeping projects to timetable.

A nearshore development centre allows teams to seamlessly fit into development practices that require real-time collaboration like Lean and Agile. Using video conferencing it is possible to participate in daily SCRUMS, demonstrate completed tasks, and resolve questions during the course of a normal working day. This advantage enables the successful, real-time alignment between clients and technical members of the nearshore development team. Nearshoring teams are able to engage far more frequently than traditional offshore partners, thus understanding goals in greater detail and solving problems more efficiently.

Cultural conversance

Poor communication is often a case of cultural, rather than language, differences. For instance, you may assume that a member of your development team would inform you of new risks or insights, but a higher cultural level of uncertainty avoidance may make this less likely. In central and eastern Europe today, work practices in the IT sector have aligned with those in the West, and cultural differences are minimal.

Cost advantage

Perhaps the primary reason for employing nearshore development services is the cost advantage. Because nearshoring services are based in countries where the wage scale is lower than in the client’s country, hourly rates for developers are much lower. This doesn’t mean that the developers are poorly skilled or paid – nearshore programmers are paid well relative to the local cost of living.

Poland as a nearshore location

The difference in labour costs between nearshoring in Europe versus offshoring in the Far East is getting smaller. The disparity is reduced further when you add in other cost factors such as lower travel expenses. Hourly rates vary considerably even among European nearshoring locations. Poland sits somewhere in the middle of the range with an excellent quality to cost ratio.

As little as a two-hour flight away from London, Poland is within easy reach whenever a face-to-face with the team is necessary. And sitting in the same time zone as continental Europe, keeping in touch on a regular basis is as easy as calling an office down the road.

Polish technical education institutions are mature and well-regarded, with more than 25 computer science master’s degrees courses producing tens of thousands of graduates every year. In Poland, just as in the Nordic countries, English language has become a natural second language among the young and well educated, and as many IT companies have an international workforce, English is often spoken as the office first language.

As a location for doing business, Poland is stable both economically and politically, and ranks at number nine in Tholons Services Globalization Index of Top Digital Nations. Polish software development companies offer significant advantages in terms of quality, reliability, security and, as a member state of the European Union, compliance with GDPR.

Nearshoring engagement models

Fixed price

The fixed price model is often used when the project scope and deliverables specifications are well defined. For these projects it is assumed the allocated resources and the timeline is established and that they will not be changed significantly during the project lifecycle.

Time & material

The time and material engagement model is recommended when the project specifications are likely to be altered and the volume of the resources allocated varies significantly during the project lifecycle. This model offers flexibility to respond to significant changes in the project scope.

Milestone-based billing

The milestone-based model suits projects where intermediary delivery control is necessary or recommended. The client evaluates the intermediate deliveries and controls the scope and the costs for the next milestone(s).

Dedicated team

This is the preferred engagement model when a client needs to manage the development team themselves. The client decides how the team allocation on tasks is done, the project methodology to be used and the planning of the work. The client is also involved in deciding the team composition. If necessary, the team can be set up in a dedicated office.

Onsite team

A team or individual personnel can be allocated to a client’s designated location to perform the project activities. This is often done at the beginning and at the closure of a project to carry out the knowledge transfer, the estimations, the planning and the handoff.

Nearshoring advice

• Focus on skills – select a nearshore partner based primarily on talent rather than price. A highly skilled team will deliver greater productivity and costs savings than a lower skilled, lower price option.
• Visit your partner – take a trip to your prospective partner’s offices, see how they work, talk to the staff and ask tough questions.
• Appoint in-house product owner – the product owner should be a senior person with a direct interest in the end product. Having a product owner who is really engaged in the product and responsible for delivering the business benefits ensures that issues will be identified and fixed earlier and at a lower cost.
• Simplify communication – the simpler and clearer your communication channels, the greater the resulting understanding and trust. Establishing simple guidelines for the partner relationship will ensure clarity and quality of work.

Problems with offshoring

For many years, offshore software development has been used by companies to reduce costs and/or address the lack of domestic resources. Offshore locations such as India and China are traditionally multiple times cheaper than in-house development in most western economies. However, the upfront pricing does not take into account long-term hidden costs and often the challenges are not apparent until it’s too late.

Developing an end product with a solid architectural foundation requires constant testing and maintenance. Effective oversight is more difficult with an offshore team due to factors such as distance, time zone, and cultural and language differences. Quality control can be problematic if offshore developers work under different assumptions about business practices and project management.

Without effective oversight it is easy for schedules to slip and projects to run well over deadline. Assumed cost savings quickly disappear. Issues with quality of code can also arise. Poor quality code lowers the value of the product; it has to be rewritten, further extending the schedule and adding to costs.

There are also times when the client does not present their goals clearly and has unrealistic expectations. Without clearly defined goals, offshore development teams are more likely to not understand requirements or overall business strategy, inevitably leading to errors.