5 Reasons Your Business Needs to Partner with a Full-Service Software Agency

C-suite executives and business owners know that their company's success depends in large part on how well they manage and maintain technology. In today's complex digital world, it is more important than ever to partner with a full-service software development partner who can help you address all your IT needs from strategy to implementation.

Technology is constantly evolving, and companies are looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve. To remain at the top of your game, you need a strong full-service software partner who can help with every aspect of your business, from marketing to development.

Plus, partnering with a full-service software agency can help you achieve your technology goals, from developing new products to modernizing complex legacy systems. In this article, we show you the reasons why you need a full-service software partner.

The Differences Between a Full-Service Agency and an Outsourcing Agency

At its simplest, outsourcing is usually a short-term deal where you need specific help with a particular issue your business is experiencing. On the other hand, partnering with a full-service agency is usually a long-term—and sometimes permanent—deal.

Full-service development agencies often integrate into your infrastructure and bring a team to augment your operations. In contrast, outsourcing means getting a fractional team member to carry out specific tasks or roles.

This table shows the difference between partnering with a full-service and outsourcing agency:

What Does a Full-Service Software Development Partner Cover?

Typically, a full-service development partner or agency covers the following 10 additional services:

1. Product Discovery: Aims to identify customer needs and then use that knowledge to build the ideal product with the best features.
2. Business Evaluation: Determines the overall standing and operation of a business to ensure that the company understands the solution they want to create, and if there is a market for it.
3. Feasibility Checks: Takes all of the project’s relevant factors into account; including technical, economic, legal, and scheduling constraints to assess project feasibility.
4. UX Research: Evaluates the users and their requirements to build a software solution that caters to them. UX research uncovers potential problems users can face and gives partners information to feed into the design process.  
5. Prototyping: Allows the development team to show work-in-progress to the client. Prototypes allow stakeholders to understand the product before it is fully functional and to perform early user testing.
6. Marketing Experimentation: The practice of A/B testing different UIs and product versions to run quantitative experiments can give the development partner invaluable information about the customers’ needs.
7. Quality assurance: QA monitors the software engineering process to ensure sufficient product quality and compliance to standards and methods. QA makes sure the client gets a functioning product that meets the state requirements.
8. Implementation: The process of developing software according to the requirements expressed by the client and other project stakeholders.
9. Maintenance: This is where many partners fail. After a solution has been implemented and deployed, a full-service software partner should be there to ensure that everything works as expected and make changes if something is amiss.
10. Scaling: Successful implementation leads to increased business outcomes; a full-service partner is capable of helping you reassess your software priorities so you can scale your product and enhance it as needed.

5 Reasons Full-Service Agencies Perform Better Than Outsourcing Agencies

When you hire a full-service provider, you delegate your IT-related needs to a specific company that provides your company with both the manpower and support you require to build specialized software solutions. The following are five reasons why full-service agencies represent a better choice than outsourced ones.

Full-Service Development Agencies Behave Like Technology Partners

Full-service development agencies partner with you and share your vision and goals, which is invaluable to most businesses. Partners are generally more engaged than outsourcing companies, and they go beyond the deliverables as they aim to build a technology solution, not just a software product.

Full-Service Partners Specialize in Specific Operations

Full-service development partners are specialists in a specific domain. That means they’re capable of delivering high-quality results in the areas they specialize in. Plus, such companies employ specialists and train their teams in those areas, as well as relevant programming languages and tech stacks.

Full-Service Software Agencies Are More Dependable

With outsourcing agencies, you never get the level of granular support you should expect from a development partner. Full-service agencies partner with you. They walk you through every step of the process rather than simply provide a service. You not only gain technical expertise but also support, transparency, and visibility.

Full-Service Partners Offer Dedicated Project Teams and Leaders

This ties in with the dependable nature of full-service development partners. Full-service agencies take over project management responsibilities and provide you with a unified point of contact for every touchpoint in your application’s lifecycle. This enables companies to manage the agency’s work easily instead of dealing with different outsourced collaborators working for various service providers.

Full-Service Partners Provide Post-Launch Support

While the launch period is exciting for the client, a lack of post-launch support can derail even the best-planned deployment. A full-service partner gives you all the support you need even after the work is done.

Salsita: Your Full-Service Development Partner

We provide design-driven development services that cover the entire software development lifecycle. We include product discovery, UX research, UX design, front- and back-end development, QA, project management, build engineering, and deployment.

Salsita’s Product Discovery & Delivery Best Practices

For the past couple of years, we’ve gradually been extending our services from pure software development to a more holistic approach to building digital products. From early product discovery to production launch and helping the product grow and sell, these changes have led to significant growth…

Salsita Software - BlogLancelot Purdue - Copywriter

We offer rapid delivery, early user testing, and incremental improvements using agile development practices.

Our areas of specialization include:

• UX and Product Design
• B2C and B2B E-Commerce
• 3D Product Visualization and Configurators
• Machine Learning, Dashboards, Data Visualization and Business Intelligence
• Online Content Editors (Text, Audio, Video)

If you want to learn more about how we conduct the product discovery and delivery process, check out this article: Salsita’s Product Discovery and Delivery Best Practices.