Development Matters Blog

Continuing our series, The Benefits of Offshore Development and Local Project Management, we would now like to discuss the benefit of access to a diversified team of highly skilled professionals.

When you utilize Merit Solutions Development Services, you have direct access to a highly-skilled team with proven technical, functional and domain expertise. Our 15+ software engineers work under 4 separate Team Leaders (Technical Team Lead, Development Team Lead, QA Team Lead, and SharePoint / CRM Team Lead). Each Belgrade-based Team Lead is managed in a very hands-on way by our US-based Director of Development, a top-notch programmer from Serbia who was instrumental in structuring our development division. In most cases, a project will blend consultants and engineers from the U.S. (analysis) with team members in Belgrade (design, coding, testing). So, our overall costs include a blend of both of these engineering locations. As mentioned before, each software engineer is English fluent, and capable of communicating directly with all of our clients.

This direct access to developers leverages our strong project management expertise, reducing the risks of miscommunication and ensuring the highest possible software development quality.

We are back for our next installment of “The Benefits of Offshore Development and Local Project Management.”

In our previous posts, we have discussed the benefits of our “nearshore location” in Eastern Europe, and the ability to take advantage of our scalable resources. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of our 24/7 virtual operations.

There is a natural time differential of 7 hours between our onshore (Chicago) and offshore (Belgrade) locations. This development model translates into a virtual 24/7 kind of operation for our projects. Leveraging our distributed resources in both locations, we are able to provide clients with maximum visibility into our software development lifecycle. We also ensure that team members, regardless of location, have overlapped work timings for day-to-day communication. We utilize video conferencing, instant messaging, web portals, and other online collaboration tools to maximize internal productivity. This enables fast and efficient client communication.

Last week, we started this series to emphasize the benefits of offshore development combined with local project management. (View the first article for benefits related to our office locations.) We call it a Hybrid Development Model, which allows us to deliver the highest quality development services to our clients at a fraction of the cost by providing the cost benefits of off-shore development services, while affording them the convenience and peace of mind of working directly with a US-based firm.

This week, we have a new benefit: scalable resources.

The Merit Solutions Development Team is composed of English-speaking and University-educated software engineers, so there is no loss in translation that is typical of other offshore development services. Our engineers have multiple skills, which allows us to utilize certain resources only when they are needed. This not only enables us to consistently deliver high quality services for large customizations, but also to effectively perform the smaller projects that often come up in Microsoft Dynamics customers’ environments.  We can scale down because there is very low overhead associated with project management and communication burdens compared to typical outsourced development.

Over the coming months, we will be writing a series of articles detailing the benefits of our Offshore Development combined with Local Project Management.

To start this series, here are 2 benefits specific to our office locations:

1. Since our development lab is located in Eastern Europe, we actually consider it ‘near shore’. The 7-hour time difference gives us enough daily overlap to collaborate efficiently across teams. There are three hours naturally overlapping in the business day, and it is easy to stretch it to five or six hours. This gives us no ‘drop off’ in collaboration between team members at different locations. And with both teams utilizing the same processes and systems, we have been able to develop a proven methodology that works.
2. With a software development lab in Eastern Europe, we are able to take advantage of a less penetrated market. It is a non-traditional region for outsourcing as compared to India or China, which enables us to consistently hire and retain the top 5% of talent. Our relationships with the US Commercial Service and local Embassies enable us to obtain visas when we need to get our developers to the US as projects sometimes demand. As contrasted to other offshore development organizations in India and China, this provides a productivity advantage, and can substantially reduce project risk.

Be sure to check back in the future for more benefits of Offshore Development and Local Project Management.