The following are the 7 most common mistakes businesses make when outsourcing web development:

1. Ambiguity in the project concept 
2. Loss of Project Control
3. Not checking for the needed skills in your resources
4. Unplanned budget and deadline setup
5. Not paying attention to client recommendations
6. Reluctant communication with the service provider
7. Avoiding official documentation

Let’s go over all the segments briefly,

1) Ambiguity in the project concept

37% of the project fail due to the lack of clear goals in the project. This happens when you might be clear with what you want from the website, but you are unclear to understand the scope of your web project. It is equally important for both, the business and web development outsourcing company, to have a clear understanding of the project goal and possibilities.

• It is critical to provoke realistic goals and expectations from your web development project. 
• For that, you can initiate by assembling the description of comprehensive requirements with a detailed scope of work mentioned that can fulfill the main purpose of your web development. 
• The scope of work should also consider the requirement of the third-party integrations in your web project if any.  
• Here assignment of specific tasks with the project’s main goals should be subjected to specific usage or accessibility during the period of your web development.

2) Loss of Project Control

Often, businesses lose control of their web projects at the beginning when they opt to outsource. It can be dependent on the methodologies, communication, vendor’s time zone, management tools, and to coordination with the outsourcing team.

Since you have hired an outsourced web development team rather than employees. And if you don’t have full control over the outsourcing team like your on-site team, it may be difficult to maintain the level of control you desire.

• Ensure your outsourcing partners follow agile and scrum methodologies.
• Your outsourcing team should have the right tools for managing projects.
• Make sure to set timelines for the meetings, track KPIs and other metrics.

3) Not checking for the needed skills in your resources

Poor resource management turns up as the biggest challenge to be faced by any web development project. Several businesses specifically early start-ups, choose to pay lesser over fairly-paid skilled and experienced resources. As a consequence, they often end up in failure with a large loss of worthy time and money.  

• Every single project requires a particular skill set from the service provider. This includes the technical team of front-end and back-end developers that can cover the end-to-end web development cycle, along with a business analyst and project manager.
• Analyze the technical as well as interpersonal skills of the team. Here we present some typical skill sets to watch out for in the development team:
  • Development literacy
  • Creative viewpoint
  • Meticulous with every detail
  • Problem-solving ability
  • Ability to explain technical proceedings
  • Clear client communication  
  • Technical competency

4) Unplanned budget and deadline setup

Budget plays the most significant role in outsourcing web development. Many-a-times businesses skip cataloging some aspects of web development like consideration of maintenance or technical glitches at any development stage. If not communicated prior this tends to cause the lengthening of the time period with the addition of extra costs for your project. 

Vipul Shah, COO at Ace Infoway, shared his thoughts with DesignRush on ‘How to Reduce Startup Web App Development Costs’. He said, developers should always build the backend first and then focus on other phases of the web app development process.

“One reason why web app development projects burn cash is the backend wasn’t done first,” said Shah.

“Web App development usually has a deep reliance on mobile-optimized APIs (& backend), and you need to plan carefully to ensure that you don’t start your web app development team too early before the backend is ready. If this is not ready, it results in leakage and idle time for web app developers. If you follow solid development practices, including dependency management, this can be avoided. It certainly optimizes your cost, if you have backend first, and deploy app developers in [a] phased manner.”

• Set a limit. But also, it is wise to understand the cost calculations done by the development company.
• Know the key attributes that decide the cost of your project:
  • The geographical location of the web development team
  • The complexity of UX-UI of the web project
  • The development approach needed for the web development (Agile / Waterfall)

5) Not paying attention to client recommendations

The recommendations from the previous clients provide insights relating to the good virtues as well as the issues faced by them while working with the said web development agency.

These recommendations have the probability to increase the potential of selecting a perfect fit web development outsourcing team for your valuable project. 

• Ask for past and present experiences from the clients of the web development companies.
• Specifically, interrogate the challenges previous clients experience during the partnership.
• Explore the case studies of the web development company in detail.

6) Reluctant communication with the service provider

According to a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, poor communication causes 44% of complete project failures. This happens frequently while outsourcing web development services from a different time zone than your native time zone. 

Also, this is encountered more when the client is not able to communicate the definite requirements to the service providers. 

• It is always better to keep the communication straight, without hesitation before handing the web development project to the agency. 
• The service provider can fulfill the requirements only when it is well understood. For that, providing detailed project necessities followed by a verbal discussion for the same always works. 
• It is an ideal practice to follow up on the meeting minutes, no matter how obvious your instruction might seem to you.  
• Also, there are various tools and technologies like Asana, Trello, Jira, Slack, and Zoom that help to establish a good communication channel throughout the development process of your web project.
• Other than this, timely communication also serves the purposes like:
  • It forms the basis of coordination and decision-making, and It increases managerial efficiency.

7) Avoiding official documentation

The contract documentation between both parties defines the project scope, deliverables, price, payment, and other relevant information about the web development project. By avoiding it, the possibilities of misunderstanding, confusion, or disputes between both parties increase significantly. More importantly, the web development agency has complete access to the data of your project. Privacy policy remains the major concern for businesses that outsource web development services.

• A trustworthy agency will always insist on making the liaison official. 
• The basic points to be covered in an official agreement include:
  • Responsibilities and obligations by the service provider
  • Total cost for the project along with its bifurcation
  • The deliverables
  • The technologies to be used 
  • Additional requirements to reach the goals
  • Timeline to complete the project
  • Payment terms and conditions
  • Handling confidential information
  • Liabilities and procedure for termination 
• A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) will secure the confidentiality of the information you share with the development team