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With a large, complex organisation and interactive website that drives high volumes of traffic, comes a lot of work. With a new project underway, you more than likely have a long list of website maintenance and day-to-day fixes to power through. In this case, your in-house development team may well need the support of an external agency to help you reach your objectives.
Leveraging the experience and expertise of an agency, our experts can support internal teams through these projects, helping to deliver on time and in budget. But every business worries about adding too many cooks in the kitchen, so how do you get the most from this in-house and external development team relationship?
From outlining responsibilities to ensuring continuous communication, here’s what you need to know to ensure a smooth working relationship and encourage effective collaboration.
1) Understand your technical abilities
First things first, you need to have an understanding of what your internal team’s technical abilities are and what can be delivered in-house. Undertaking a project that stretches beyond their abilities will limit results and run the risk of creating further and costly website issues.
Let’s say, you ask your in-house team to add a subscription service functionality to your site. After weeks of research and a lot of trial and error, your developer will no doubt find a way to integrate this service, but is it the most efficient way? How much of their time did it take? What else could it effect on site?
Further down the line, inefficient code is discovered by your web agency that is affecting site performance. This requires extra time to unpick and fix these elements before work can even begin on the next phase of your project, stretching your in-house team further than their capabilities and suddenly creating an expensive exercise.
2) Benefit from extensive agency experience
Working with an agency allows your brand to leverage their expertise from other projects. No matter how experienced your internal team is, they are ultimately limited by what they have been exposed to. By blending the in-house granular business knowledge with an agency’s wide project experience, you can form a powerful development team.
This is also an opportunity to support the development of your internal team, helping them upskill and extend their technical capabilities. Working with an agency who has had exposure to multiple businesses and bespoke projects, your internal developers get to do things that they may not usually have the chance to do. No matter how custom your website is, a good agency will be able to ‘get under the hood' of your site and understand what is possible. Guiding your internal team along the way, these newfound skills can then be transferred, benefitting your business in the long run.
3) Engage early
Choosing an external team to help support your web project means you need to engage as early as possible. Even if their resource is not needed until phase two of the project, being part of the project from the outset significantly reduces the time an agency will take to catch up on and understand the work completed in phase one. It also allows requirements to be fully understood, capabilities to be assessed, and recommendations provided upfront to help shape your project.
Not involving your agency early can have a potential knock-on effect on other parts of your project. This is particularly true of CRM and website projects that include multiple third parties engaged during different parts of the project. Without bringing these third parties together, thorough scoping becomes impossible which subsequently prolongs delivery timeframes and increases costs.
4) Set clear expectations and split responsibilities
What do you want your in-house team to deliver? What do you expect your agency to deliver? Before onboarding a new agency, take the time to really consider why you need them, what their responsibilities will be, and what you want to achieve. Understand from the start who is responsible for what and whether these expectations are realistic.
Your decisions on this could be led by your desired timescales, in-house capabilities, or available budget. Taking part in detailed scoping helps to break down the project into tasks, making it easier to split out responsibilities with clear accountability of your teams’ responsibilities versus what the agency will cover.
5) Support full visibility
One of the main challenges that hinder collaborative working between in-house and external development teams is the sharing of code. In some cases, a business may have strict security policies and own all of their source code, hosting, and database. They hold the keys to their live environments, which means the external team can only work on a preview.
This makes it difficult for teams to work together productively. When an issue occurs, while the agency can create the fixes, the client has to release them on site. But if releases build up alongside other work, they can quickly become outdated and therefore ineffective. Working in this way with an agency can end up eating into your retainer time significantly.
The challenge is similar when it comes to hosting too. If the agency owns the hosting of a website alongside the support, they have full visibility, making it easy to recognise and resolve issues as they arise. However, if your agency supports the site, but it's hosted elsewhere, ownership issues can arise. A lack of visibility can easily impact timescales and project success. We advise, where possible, to ensure full visibility between all parties so issues can be quickly resolved and fixes implemented.
6) Establish clear communication channels
Establishing a collaborative working relationship through centralised channels encourages continuous communication between both teams. When an agency and in-house team work well together, it makes it easier to talk through problems and guide one another to the best solution.
With our client, iStructE, the vast majority of communication is developer-to-developer. Instead of communication being channeled through our Account Manager and their internal Marketing Manager, we enable a direct relationship between developers through an open Slack channel, supported by email and phone where necessary. Not only does this create a more streamlined way of working, it prevents time being wasted on passing messages along to the right person and ensures the experts are free to discuss the project at any stage. This direct relationship means its even quicker to get things actioned.
7) Embrace regular audits
When we work alongside an in-house team, we recommend regular audits to keep your website code in tip-top condition. Embracing regular checkpoints where code quality can be assessed prevents inefficient legacy code building up on your site’s live environment and captures other site performance issues.
Equally, when beginning a project with an agency, an audit is a great way for the team to get up to speed with how your website works, how it can be improved, and feeds into the project scoping.
8) Shape your retainer to support your needs
A retainer plan encourages a consultative and phased approach between your agency and internal team, ensuring each website change can be seamlessly managed while keeping the necessary people informed.
Your retainer plan should be shaped to the needs of your business. For example, you may have the resource in-house to implement what needs doing but lack the expertise on how it actually needs to be done. In this instance, your retainer time could support a consultative approach whereby the agency guides you on best practices to get you from A to B.
This approach also lends itself to bigger projects that arise outside of your in-house team’s technical ability. In these cases, the external team is already in the loop, understands exactly where you have got to and have guided your team up to this point. This puts both parties in a better place to take on their project responsibilities and hit the ground running.
Collaborating with IDHL
Forging a streamlined working relationship between your internal and external development team is key to ongoing success. Full visibility and continuous communication fosters knowledge sharing and collaboration, not only improving the skill set of your internal team but also helping you achieve your objectives.
At IDHL, we understand how integral symbiosis between our experts and in-house teams is to business growth. We have experience working alongside internal brand development teams, supporting and guiding them through their projects. Get in touch to find out how joining forces can help your brand.
