Balancing Cost and Skills

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management   Strategy  

A customer recently asked for my opinion on something that one of their vendors had presented to them. The vendor was producing some custom software, and when reviewing the details of the plan it had come to light that one of the developers on the project was less experienced. As a result they were cheaper, but they would take longer to do the work and require additional oversight--all of which was being billed to my customer.

My customer felt that the overall cost of the initiative would be higher than if an experienced developer was assigned to the project in the first place; they didn’t see why they should pay the higher overall cost so that the vendor could train their staff. The vendor’s perspective was that by strengthening the overall quality of their development team, they would be better able to support my customer both in future product upgrades and also with any technical support.

It’s an interesting debate--and one that I want to explore here. I’ll take the perspective of the vendor because it allows us to explore some of the issues in a little more depth.

The need for a balanced skillset
When we are building a development team, it’s important to have a balance between all of the different elements--we can’t have all front-end developers and no back-end, or all testers and no coders. The same is true for skills …

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