Choosing an IT contractor: the main mistakes and risks

Choosing the company that will develop your mobile app or build your site often turns into a problem. Business owners who work outside IT simply do not know how to go about it properly. We have gone through the experience of dozens of projects and found the five most common problems in searching for and choosing IT contractors. 

All of them apply to web development, site promotion and mobile development alike. 

Let us go through these five key mistakes. 

We also recommend reading: How do you organise remote work 

Hunting for the lowest price is the best way to overpay 

This is the most obvious and the most widespread mistake. Most clients look for a contractor who will do everything on the cheap. Meanwhile they pay no attention to the company's portfolio, to reviews or to experience with similar tasks. All of that leads to the expected result — the work is done slowly and badly. 

A bad experience pushes people towards the wrong conclusions. Clients who have lost money because of poor work then convince others that SEO does not work, or that mobile apps are useless, and so on. Although in reality it all comes down to the quality of the service. 

Our advice is not to go to extremes: study the market and the pricing. And, most importantly, make the decision on a combination of factors. Do not look only at the price of the work. 

Setting the shortest possible deadlines is a mistake too 

You often meet a client who wants an app or a site in a few days. At the same time the brief lists several complex functions and high security requirements. 

In the end the client either has to accept work that is plainly weak and unfinished, or agree to extend the deadline and pay extra. Ultimately both sides end up unhappy. 

When choosing a contractor, always ask how much time the work needs. Find the average of the timescales you are quoted and stick to it. 

Choosing a contractor with no experience. But why? 

A reliable studio that is actively working simply cannot fail to have a portfolio. There can be no case studies in only a few situations: 

• the contractor cannot or does not want to show their work;

• the contractor has only recently entered the market and has no experience of large projects with serious requirements. 

Entrusting the work to such studios or freelancers is not always unambiguously a mistake, but it is definitely a big risk. 

Hiring several contractors at once. Do not split the work without need 

Imagine the situation: you want to launch a marketplace. For that you will need: 

• good hosting or even a VPS server; 

• specialists to write the site's code;

• design specialists;

• a marketer;

• an SEO specialist;

• an SMM specialist;

• a copywriter (or even a whole team). 

All these specialists will be solving very different tasks, yet at the same time they have to work well together. The client naturally wants to find the best of each. A web studio is far from always able to supply every one of the specialists listed. So a team has to be assembled on the fly out of the main contractor, freelancers and in-house specialists. 

Our advice is to try to pick contractors so that there are as few of them as possible. For example, it makes sense to order the running of social media pages and the setting up of targeted advertising from one company. Remember, the fewer elements a system has, the easier it is to set up and launch. 

Staying out of the project. No, they will not get it all done without you

Many clients stay out of the project. On the one hand that is logical: a business owner is a busy person and there is never enough time. But put yourself in the place of the contractor who wants to do the work well. 

A client who does not look at the intermediate results gives none of the feedback needed to finish the project successfully. 

Any creative work always involves a collision between your vision and the contractor's ideas. If you do not find the time to state your opinion, it will not be taken into account and you will end up dissatisfied. 

The client has two options: 

• keep sensible control over the course of the work;

• give the contractor 100% freedom of action and accept all their decisions.  

Take our advice on board, avoid the mistakes and finish your projects successfully.