Discover the Secret to Faster Digital Transformation (It May Be Closer Than You Think)

For many companies, digital transformation is just as much about finding fast ways to solve new, urgent challenges as it is about strategic long-term planning. For example:

• How do you enable an entire workforce to work remotely? 

• How do you scale existing or add new digital channels to meet surging demand? 

• How do you safely and securely deliver essential services online? 

• How do you create a touchless, seamless, never-leave-your-home experience for a business that has been all brick-and-mortar? 

• How do you re-calibrate a supply chain or re-tool a manufacturing line to meet developing changes in demand?

Going faster, however, may be easier said than done. It’s difficult to find the skilled technical talent you need, when you need it. It’s just as hard to keep that talent within a budget that meets your business needs, scale up or down when you need to, and ensure it all works together in a smooth process that leads to robust, high-quality software projects. To overcome these challenges, some savvy companies turn to nearshoring, or outsourcing software development in nearby countries.

You Need Skilled Developers

Most senior technology executives consistently rank availability of skilled developers among the top five risks they face. According to one industry report, companies can hire only 60% of their technical staff in the U.S., and it takes 50% longer to hire those roles than any other. If your digital transformation software project is complex, finding the right skill sets can slow or even stall your project.

You Need to Scale Up and Down Quickly

When you’ve finally acquired a team of experienced developers, you will probably need to find creative ways to scale the team up, or down, as business needs change. 

When scaling up, you juggle finding and onboarding developers, building a cohesive team, and keeping the project moving. Finding, vetting, and interviewing candidates can take up a lot of time. The skills you need might not be available or cost more than your budget allows. You may struggle to build a cohesive development team. All this can delay your progress.

If you can’t sustain a full development team when your digital transformation project pipeline slows down, you must re-deploy the team to other work. If there’s no other work available, you may face expensive furloughs or layoffs. Highly skilled developers won’t wait for the work to come back, and will quickly find jobs elsewhere. When you’re ready to start up again, you must rebuild your team from the beginning. 

You Need a Proven Process to Deliver Quality Software Fast

If your digital transformation project involves complex, full-stack web or mobile applications, you need a proven process that will ensure you can deliver high-quality software fast. Agile approaches provide an ideal solution, enabling teams to release software in smaller iterations at a much faster pace. By providing a framework for quickly adapting to user feedback, Agile helps teams quickly deliver the high-powered digital experiences end-users demand. 

With teams that work across multiple locations, it can be challenging to maintain the frequent, intensive communication that is critical to Agile development. The benefits are worth it, though, and companies increasingly adapt Agile for distributed teams. CollabNet VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report™ says that 78% of the respondents work in a distributed Agile model, and 68% practice Agile with multiple, co-located teams working across geographic boundaries. 

Benefits gained from Agile:

• Faster time to delivery and faster time to market

• Increased team productivity

• Improved responsiveness to changing requirements

• Reduced time spent managing teams, more time innovating

• Enhanced stakeholder engagement

• Higher quality products with less rework

Why You Should Consider Nearshoring

Some companies choose to speed digital transformation development by offshoring resources in another country, which offers a wider talent pool with lower hourly rates. Yet traditional offshoring locations, such as India and the Ukraine, add new complications. For example, you may find it isn’t as easy or efficient to manage teams that work in time zones outside of your business hours, speak unfamiliar languages, and operate in different cultures. Many companies have struggled to sustain effective and timely collaboration under these conditions. However, the benefits may outweigh the challenges for simpler projects that require limited communication, such as software maintenance or well-defined waterfall projects.

Outsourcing development to nearby countries, or nearshoring, eliminates many of the challenges of outsourcing. For companies based in the U.S., nearshoring in nearby Latin America may be the ideal solution for speeding software delivery. There are many advantages of nearshoring in Latin America: 

• A deep pool of skilled technical talent available at affordable rates means you get the experienced developers you need, when you need them, without breaking your budget.

• Because they’re working in the same or adjacent time-zones, your nearshore developers can address critical information and feedback within the same business day, so your projects stay on track.

• The shared language and cultural affinity of a nearshore team means that communication and collaboration flow freely and you get answers, updates, and results on your schedule.

• When you nearshore development of complex projects, you keep all the advantages of outsourcing, without the risks of offshoring.

• Widespread adoption of distributed Agile, an adaptation of Agile for dispersed teams, means you get collaboration and transparency—as well as the cost efficiencies that result from lower overhead.

Nearshoring can be a very efficient way to deliver custom software projects that you can’t easily resource internally. When you’re evaluating strategies to speed up your project pipeline, nearshoring should be one of the first options you consider. 

How Gorilla Logic Can Help You Go Faster

As a proven nearshoring partner for custom software development and a premier employer in Latin America, our hubs in Costa Rica and Colombia are home to some of the most highly-skilled, Agile-native developers you’ll find anywhere. In fact, many Fortune 100 companies, including Amazon, Citibank, and Proctor & Gamble, have strategic technology outsourcing centers in these locations. 

Hand-selecting each developer for your project, we craft a purpose-built team that fits with your company culture, speaks your language, and works in your time zones. You get services customized to your specific project requirements, even when they flex, with full-stack mobile and web development capabilities that include UI/UX design and development, back-end development, DevOps and cloud services, QA testing, and more. We work with your tools and processes, applying a pragmatic Agile process that is customized to the specific needs of your product. 

When you combine the advantages of proven nearshoring with expert Agile software development, you get the Gorilla Logic advantage for digital transformation projects. We can help you optimize your budget and deliver higher-quality products that transform your business faster. 

Finish Line uses nearshoring to speed delivery of a 5-star fan-friendly mobile commerce app, used by more than 250,000 shoppers to shop and redeem loyalty points.