HARNESS HOME-GROWN TALENT

Rob Sandbach outlines how the UK should leverage both its soft and hard skills to offer the most attractive app and website development propositions for businesses worldwide

- Kym Winters

The global market for outsourcing is increasingly growing. For a relatively low cost, you can offshore the development of your website or app to a competent coding team in a faraway destination. The main driver for this is obviously to keep costs down. Getting work from talented offshore developers for a low cost is an alluring proposition for any business and often they can deliver great results.

However, while offshore development teams are able to build exactly what you ask for if you provide them with very specific requirements, their skills don’t usually extend beyond coding. In many ways consultancy, creative thinking and strategic input are far more critical to the ultimate success of your website or app than the code alone.

The UK is world-renowned in both the creative and digital industries for offering an end-to-end service, creative design, UI/UX and providing expertise that can’t be matched. Experienced UK-based development teams are comfortable working with modern project methodologies like Agile, which can keep you in the loop and are open to changes mid-project. Meanwhile UKbased project managers are able to more effectively understand your business needs and provide frequent playbacks in person.

MAINTAIN THE UK’S WORLD-CLASS EXPERTISE

Engaging with UK-based development teams can lead to a more value-adding experience. Having contributed more than £2bn to sales made on the iOS App Store, Britain is Europe’s most successful nation when it comes to app development (https://netm.ag/38OfoY3). While London is usually thought of as the UK’s digital development hub, other major cities including Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham have also been instrumental in shaping the nation’s development lead. The UK’s homegrown talent is generally more well-rounded, with knowledge and insights that extend far beyond the area of code.