Right now you're making 1 million dollars a year per employee or a 10x or 20x revenue to average employee cost.
The reason your software providers probably suck is that I'm not hearing how permanent or consultant employees can provide the kind of ROI that it will cost to build even basic software.
Let's say you're based in Detroit, MI - somewhere dirt cheap - 3 engineers for 1 year is 350K in salary, another ~300k in benefits and then you'll take 2 to 3 people normally earning money off their real work to be the domain experts.
Let's say 1 million in developers and 2 people providing 10x the value of their 100k salaries as well, and that's 3 million dollars of cost + lost revenue from productive employees.
If your company has a 15% profit margin on revenue and 250M in revenue - you're making 37.5 mil in profit, and you'll be giving up roughly ~10% of the company profits on this venture.
So the question is, do you think you have greater than 70% chance of getting a 3x return on their cost? Maybe 9 million dollars more worth of revenue?
If not, the project will fail just from the ROI expectations of the bean counters.
You could try to outsource stuff to somewhere with cheaper programmers but that just means the 2 million in lost revenue from productive employees becomes 20 million in lost revenue as the outsourced engineers need 10x the handholding because they aren't onsite, watching the people that do the work and interacting with them with a tight feedback loop.
Right now you're making 1 million dollars a year per employee or a 10x or 20x revenue to average employee cost.
The reason your software providers probably suck is that I'm not hearing how permanent or consultant employees can provide the kind of ROI that it will cost to build even basic software.
Let's say you're based in Detroit, MI - somewhere dirt cheap - 3 engineers for 1 year is 350K in salary, another ~300k in benefits and then you'll take 2 to 3 people normally earning money off their real work to be the domain experts.
Let's say 1 million in developers and 2 people providing 10x the value of their 100k salaries as well, and that's 3 million dollars of cost + lost revenue from productive employees.
If your company has a 15% profit margin on revenue and 250M in revenue - you're making 37.5 mil in profit, and you'll be giving up roughly ~10% of the company profits on this venture.
So the question is, do you think you have greater than 70% chance of getting a 3x return on their cost? Maybe 9 million dollars more worth of revenue?
If not, the project will fail just from the ROI expectations of the bean counters.
You could try to outsource stuff to somewhere with cheaper programmers but that just means the 2 million in lost revenue from productive employees becomes 20 million in lost revenue as the outsourced engineers need 10x the handholding because they aren't onsite, watching the people that do the work and interacting with them with a tight feedback loop.