One of EnergyQuote’s biggest costs was technology. The company needed to make a step-change in technology investment to create a differentiated, Software-as-a-Service offering.
However, technology changes of this nature are expensive and require upfront investment before any additional revenue can be generated.
“Our dilemma was: How could we deliver our software development roadmap within budget, at the right quality, and on time?”
We initially selected a 3rd party outsourcer in India. However, outsourcing failed miserably.
We did not have adequate control over our team of developers. Costs spiralled and key resources were frequently reassigned to other clients.
Eventually, Christopher decided to take control, hiring his lead developer in Bangalore, around whom he built teams of developers working on different projects This proved to be a wildly successful model, growing to a team of 60.
The key to our success was our ability to scale our tech team into more specialised roles. Historically developers performed a generalist role from business analyst, developer and tester. However this was highly problematic, productivity was low, and they were never that interested in some aspects of their role such as testing which suffered. Moreover, if they left it was impossible to replace them putting us back months in lost development time.
Our offshore staff allowed us to scale the team, specialising roles in testing and support development. Over and above this we pursued a mentoring team model of juniors and seniors, working collaboratively. “As the tech team scaled, we had far higher resilience at a far lower blended cost. “We found that our staff benefited too. They were able to experience greater career growth, taking on more challenging roles, while increasing our retention,” enthused Christopher.
This lead to a far more productive and higher quality development cycle. By investing earlier in robust system design and standards we were also able to get the software to market much faster.
This created a virtuous circle that accelerated overall revenue.
This article is part three of a six-part series. Next, we will look at how offshoring unexpectedly transformed EnergyQuote JHA’s sales and marketing.
In case you missed the previous posts, here they are:
How a CEO delivered £21m of value and an exit to Accenture by building offshore teams – Part 1 of 6
