The other side of this puzzle is sharing real-life examples of companies that are putting these practices into use. And that’s what we’ll do here. We’ll tell you more about the top companies in the world that leveraged outsourced/remote development and are worth millions of dollars today.

Let’s jump in!

Why Do Companies Outsource?

Outsourcing is a trend that’s only growing, and you may find it surprising that it’s not just happening in I.T. but also in industries like HR, where the market is predicted to reach close to $20B in 2023.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t those who raise their eyebrows or even wrinkle their nose when they hear the phrase “outsourced development”. From a broader perspective, not everyone feels comfortable delegating work to contractors. It might even provoke a deep feeling of discomfort in some. Sure, having a team of in-house developers undoubtedly has great benefits. The thing is, not everyone can afford (senior) developers, especially in the early stages of their business. And not everyone wants to spend money to hire full-time developers before they have a stable flow of incoming client work. That makes it a very frustrating ‘chicken and egg’ situation: you need the expertise, but you can’t afford to hire for it. That’s one area outsourcing fits in perfectly!

Surveys that included top companies like Accenture also showed that 56% of companies outsourcing cited cutting costs as a main driver in choosing to outsource.

Saving money is one reason business owners implement outsourcing into their business strategy. Other reasons companies might choose to outsource include:

• Increased productivity and competitiveness
• Hiring and staffing
• Growth and key advantages over competitors

As we’ll show below, those benefits are often a catalyst for growth; here is a list of 14 million-dollar companies that have used outsourcing to scale their business and see massive returns as a result. 

14 Examples of Companies That Outsource for Massive Growth

1. Alibaba.com

For many, Alibaba.com is China’s eBay, but few know that it started as a small “internet company” called China Yellow Pages. Today Alibaba is the world’s biggest global marketplace. When it went public in 2014, it was able to score the biggest IPO ever. But what does outsourcing have to do with it? Well, according to the book “Alibaba: The Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World’s Biggest Online Marketplace”, in its early days, the founder Jack Ma outsourced the website development to a U.S. firm. At the time, development talent in China was in short supply, while developers in the U.S. had the skills Alibaba were looking for. That’s just one reason, though. The other factor behind Alibaba’s huge success is that Ma was forced to find workarounds and viable ways to grow his company in the face of internet restrictions in China. Currently, the company still relies on outsourcing partners for production, but they’re mainly located in China.

Alibaba’s story is a prime example of a leading Ecommerce company using outsourcing to expand internationally and drive massive growth, which paid off massively in the long term.

2. AppSumo

If you’re just a bit interested in marketing, you already know the name I’m about to drop here: Noah Kagan, the serial entrepreneur who worked for Facebook, Mint.com, and founder of AppSumo.

Launched in 2010, AppSumo is a website that shares and distributes daily deals to its subscribers, mostly tech-focused or software related. These include discounted prices on high-priced software, as well as lifetime access to yearly online courses and other tech-oriented perks.  AppSumois now valued at $2 million, with an impressive mailing list comprising some 700K subscribers.

In an entertaining blog post from a while ago, Noah personally explains how he saw a niche for the business he had started to work on and needed to validate his MVP. That’s why he hired a remote developer to code a PayPal integration and start collecting payments through his new website. The overall cost was $50. He then started selling subscriptions to Imgur PRO, an image-sharing website and image host, and then added to a broader list of paid web apps, software, and courses. To this day, AppSumo still relies on outsourcing for many of its areas and projects.

3. Basecamp

Launched in its first iteration in 2004, Basecamp is a web-project development tool that helps businesses and project managers to handle project development more efficiently. The company behind it, 37signals (later rebranded to Basecamp), had started work on the project a couple of years before when they noticed key issues with their client work. As Jason Fried explains:

”As demand for our services grew, we found ourselves increasingly disorganized.[…] We didn’t like the rag-tag image we were portraying to our clients. They were paying us good money — and our work was good — but the way we organized the work, communicated about the work, and presented the work wasn’t becoming. It was time to tidy up and get our shit together.

Still, they were a web consulting company, and Basecamp wasn’t their core business. To move the app’s development further, Jason and his teammates outsourced it to remote developers to optimize their cost-opportunity gain. Thanks to implementing outsourced development into their product development strategy, they quickly started seeing Basecamp generate more revenue than their current consulting work and opted to focus exclusively on working on it as their core business. Today Basecamp employs 57+ people across the globe, and continues going from strength to strength.

4. Expensify

Founded in 2008, Expensify focused on one goal: to help people by providing a tool to collect expenses and keep track of receipts and transactions, easily, efficiently, and simply.

Today, Expensify is a company with 130+ employees and is listed on the stock exchange, with over $169m in revenue per year and serving over 60,000 companies. But building such solutions takes a lot of expertise and effort: Expensify partnered with an outsourced international software house to help them build their back-end systems.his enabled them to concentrate (almost) exclusively on front-end development and focus their in-house resources on growing their business.

5. GitHub

In the world of code, GitHub is one of the most known communities people use and engage with. Founded in 2008 by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner, as a way to host, document, edit, and share private code, it has its roots in an outsourced development consultancy. It was, in fact, by attending several local Ruby on Rails meetups in San Francisco that Tom met with Scott Chacon, a huge expert on Git, an Open Source distributed version control system.

As Tom recalls:

I was thinking Git might be really cool and could get really popular

Scott was the ideal candidate for that. The problem was they didn’t have enough money to hire him as a full-time developer. So they had only one choice left to reach their goal of simplifying their product and push it further: they hired Scott as a Git outsource contractor to eventually build the backend of Gist, a sharing feature within GitHub (See the difference here).

Started as a side project and banking on outsourced development, GitHub is now used by 100 million developers worldwide.

6. Google

As one of the top companies famed for taking care of its in-house culture and employees, it might look like a bit of a mistake to list Google here. The reality, though, is that the tech giant, headquartered in Mountain View, California, has been working with outsourced staff across multiple types of roles for years, with contractors even outnumbering the actual number of employees they have. Whether it’s IT specialists, developers, or multiple other roles, Google already had 120,000+ outsourced employees by 2019. Google is a strong implementer of outsourced work to take care of the many projects they continuously deploy and work on.

One example of where they made a big outsourcing decision is when they decided to outsource phone and email support for Google Ads back in 2011. Google Ads is their biggest earner, so getting it right was important: outsourcing provided the right solution to this and helped them continue their growth by focusing their resources on other areas of the business.7.

7. Unilever

As one of the largest companies for consumer goods in the world, you probably encounter or use a Unilever product every single day. With revenue exceeding $60 billion, it’s no surprise that this company outsources many portions of its operations.

One area it outsources is its HR Business Processing: a core function that supports its 148,000+ employees throughout their careers. As Teo Correia, a senior managing director at Accenture, the company awarded the contract in question, said, 

“Unilever strives continually to find new ways of improving its HR function to enhance the skills and abilities of its global workforce, and this contract is key to achieving future success and higher performance.”

Outsourcing is therefore enabling Unilever to deliver efficiencies across the globe to this day.

8. Microsoft

Originally founded in 1975, Microsoft has grown to be a household name across the globe, with a revenue of over $198 billion per year. But even at that size, outsourcing is a crucial part of Microsoft’s operations: a wide variety of its functions are carried out by multiple companies across the globe. This spans a variety of the company’s core functions, including IT support and finance, accounting, and procurement services. 

The company itself employs over 220,000 people directly, and it’s said to employ an equal number of people on an outsourced basis to keep it running at optimal condition!

9. MySQL

With its first release back in 1995, MySQL proved to the world it was something we needed when it comes to working and managing databases. Part of its success is due to two key elements: the release of its source code under the GNU General Public License and the smart outsourcing strategy implemented by the management right from the beginning.

In fact, the company saw its growth strategy would need to include mostly outsourced developers and staff worldwide to boost operations in each location. Today, MySQL runs on millions of servers, and it’s used by many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing organizations, such as Amazon, Facebook, NASA, and Cisco, just to name a few.

10. Opera

Opera is a modern and light web browser originally born as a research project inside Telenor, the largest Norwegian telecommunications company. It started out in 1995 with a public release, with the project branching out into a separate company named Opera Software ASA (later bought by Oracle).

Outsourcing made perfect sense for a fledgling company with a bright idea: they needed to maximize their available resources while keeping costs in check. That’s why they handed out part of the development responsibilities to developers across the globe when they started, helping them create and grow their platform to the successful browser in use by millions across the globe today.

11. SeatGeek

The ticket industry is backward, technologically.

It’s this blunt statement that the whole idea of SeatGeek gravitates around. As a search engine for tickets based on event-ticketing websites that help save money for its users, that was launched by two friends, Russel D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger, back in 2009.

Both are firm believers in the power of outsourcing in the early stages. When they needed to launch their product, they therefore relied on outsourced developers to build their website and their database structure. Even today, the company runs the business with an internal team (400+ employees worldwide) while receiving support from outsourced contractors.

12. Skype

Skype was one of the most disruptive tools and technologies during the early 2000s. The idea of Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis wouldn’t have been part of our lives if they hadn’t outsourced the back-end development of the app to three Estonian developers named Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla, and Priit Kasesalu.

This team had already collaborated on another product with similar peer-to-peer technology for sharing music: a peer-to-peer software the older ones among us will remember, called Kazaa.

Thanks to its philosophy of outsourcing development, Skype was able not only to enter the market but also to become a widespread tool among businesses of all sizes. In 2011, Skype became part of Microsoft, which bought it for $8.5 billion.

13. Slack

If you work with remote peers, you probably use Slack, an online collaboration tool app for teams that has become ubiquitous with remote working. Launched in 2013 by four founders, Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov, this widely-used software perfectly embodies the startup approach to launching a new product. Before opening it up to the first beta testers, Slack’s development was outsourced to a design firm, which took care of the app, website, and even its logo.

After that phase, once the product was good enough for the founders, they invited other users and teams to test it out and provide feedback, with 8,000 users signing up on the first day. Today Slack accounts for more than 12 million daily users.

14. Whatsapp

Founded by two former Yahoo! employees, Brian Acton, and Jan Koum, Whatsapp is synonymous with smartphones today, and is the most commonly used communications app in the world. This startup which launched in 2009 and was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2013 for $19.3+ billion, has never denied working extensively with outsourced developers.

Based on publicly available info, we know the core development was originally outsourced to Russia, starting with a contracted iPhone developer named Igor Solomennikov, who then proceeded to join the company eventually as CIO.

Leverage Outsourcing in Your Business for Growth

What’s the story here? In a nutshell, leveraging outsourcing (moderately to highly) can truly have a positive impact on your business. Specifically, outsourcing part of your client work or even part of your site development can benefit you because it’s:

• Budget-friendly
• Time-efficient
• Enables instant access to expert and specialized service providers
• Relieves internal resource constraints
• Lets you efficiently balance in-house staff and overhead expenses

At Codeable, we specialize in helping companies unlock all of these benefits and more, by matching you with expert WordPress developers who will be able to embark on your projects efficiently, effectively, and at exactly the right scale you need. Start a project with us today!

The post 14 Multi-Million Companies Who Were Built Leveraging Outsourced And Remote Developers appeared first on Codeable.

There are many reasons why eCommerce store owners opt to build headless WooCommerce sites. Some popular reasons include improving their site performance, increasing security, adding more customizability, and getting a shop that can scale with the business.

In this article, we will explain what a headless WooCommerce site is, its main benefits, and how you can build yours using the WordPress freelancer platform Codeable.

What is a Headless WooCommerce Site?

A headless website is one where the user interface (or the frontend, what users see when they visit your website) is separate from the database (or the backend, the place from where you manage your pages and products). 

A headless site would allow you to use a custom UI (one that is written in ReactJS or another programming language you like) and connect it to your WooCommerce database. 

One huge benefit is that a headless WooCommerce site is able to keep your entire product catalog, inventory, shopping cart, payment gateways, fees, tax configuration, and all backend available – but you would also be able to deploy this data on any frontend you want. This means that you have complete control over what your site looks like and how well it performs!

In other words, a headless system can decouple the “body” or content repository for your site from the “head” or presentation layer that your visitors see. 

Many popular sites do this. For example, Amazon has an online store and a dedicated mobile app. Both these channels display the same information; in this case, products available from a database.

How Do You Create a Headless CMS?

One way to create a headless CMS (or Content Management System) site (for instance, one build on WooCommerce) is by using the WooCommerce REST API or WordPress REST API. APIs are tools that assist applications in exchanging data; in this case, making your WooCommerce database endlessly reusable and allowing you to connect your store backend with a customized frontend. 

Some developers also like to use GraphQL, a query language for APIs that can break data queries into smaller and more manageable chunks.

What Are the Benefits of Using Headless WooCommerce?

There are several reasons why you might want to consider separating your WooCommerce backend and frontend. So, let’s go through a few of them in a little more detail and include some examples to help you decide whether your store is a good candidate for doing this as well.

Improving Your Site’s Performance

If you want to build a standard WooCommerce website that looks good and performs well, you will need to rely on themes, plugins, and extensions – all of which will include plenty of code. The issue is that the more plugins and extensions you use, the more likely you are to increase your site’s load time because each functionality you install will require visitors to download multiple files to display things right.

However, if you create a custom UI, you don’t need to rely on themes, WordPress plugins, or extensions to give your users the feature they need to look for and purchase products. You design what you want how you want it, which translates into fewer plugins required and an overall better site speed and performance!

Having More Customizability

If you use the standard WooCommerce functionality, you will quickly find it can be pretty challenging to customize the code. The reason is that your store probably relies on several plugins, extensions, themes, and templates that are not always compatible.

With a default WooCommerce installation and a set of bulky tools on top of it, you’ll be limited to what your templates allow you to design. You won’t be able to, for example, customize your files beyond their specific base functionality. And, worse yet, you’ll be loading tons of resources your site doesn’t actually need.  

On the other hand, if you choose to use a third-party system, you can implement much more flexible design features that are tailored to your business. This is another reason why many shop owners prefer to move away from WooCommerce plugins and themes and instead use a customized frontend created to their exact specifications.

Using the Same Backend Across Multiple Channels

Another one of the main reasons why several people opt for the headless WooCommerce approach is that it allows them to connect their backend to a personalized frontend. So, you get all the functionality of a powerful platform like WooCommerce but can choose how to use it to your benefit! There are various scenarios where this can come in handy:

• You want to create multiple eCommerce stores that share the same backend. For example, you can have a separate site for your Japanese users or your American users but sell them the same products.
• You want to connect your backend to a mobile or smartwatch app in addition to a website. This way, you have access to all the functionalities and data but can distribute it how you see fit.

Improving Your Site’s Security

Another important reason why many site owners choose headless WooCommerce is to improve website security. 

Since the front end and back end are kept separate, attackers have a much harder time breaching your site’s security. In large part, because headless sites make it much more difficult for them to find the admin panel!

Other Considerations When Using Headless WordPress

We’ve covered the definition of a headless site, some common approaches to creating one, and its advantages and disadvantages. Now, let’s quickly go through a few more specific things you should keep in mind if you choose this path.

• You’ll need to build your own schema: schema markup is essential for helping search engines understand your WordPress site’s structure and type of content. While headless CMS is lightweight and high-performing, you will need to set up schema and SEO yourself.
• Your images might not be optimized: If you want to make sure the site loads fast, make sure you also include a way to compress your pictures.

You can use a static site generator: If you don’t want to use a specific framework to create your headless site, you can output all content created through your WordPress installation automatically using a static site generator. Gatsby, for example, is an open-source program that can pull data from anywhere using ReactJS.

Build a Headless WooCommerce Site with Codeable

If you think a headless WooCommerce site is a great idea for your shop, but you’re not sure you can make it happen yourself, you should consider using a freelancer platform such as Codeable.

Codeable is a WordPress developer hiring platform with a pool of over 700 coders who specialize in different areas of the popular CMS and WooCommerce. Whatever WordPress project you have in mind, Codeable will have several experts available who can turn your vision into a reality.

Many of Codeable’s developers are also experienced in custom API integration and will be able to build your headless WooCommerce site in no time. They will also create your custom UI and connect it to your WooCommerce backend.

All you have to do is submit your brief and wait a few hours to give as many developers as possible a chance to show their interest. You’ll be matched with one to five professionals who will be able to take on the work immediately. You will also be able to chat with them to see who is the best fit and ask all relevant questions or request links to previous work. 

With Codeable, you get a single estimate no matter how many web application developers are interested in giving you a hand with your headless WooCommerce site. This means that you can make your choice based on quality and not price!

This efficient process means your whole project can be scoped within 24 hours.

Submit your project to Codeable today.

The post How to Build a Headless WooCommerce eCommerce Site in 2023 appeared first on Codeable.

The client is asking for a very specific task and you don’t have that specialty among your in-house resources. What do you do now?

You don’t want to miss this job opportunity, of course. But this means you’d need to find a trusted WordPress specialist, ask them how much they’ll charge you, add your markup eventually, and then get back to your client with a proposal.

Your entrepreneurial mind realizes what’s the major obstacle you’re called to overcome here:

How come I can get an estimate for my client’s request without hiring the developer? Is it even possible?

While many might assume this to be difficult or even impossible for some reason, the truth is quite the opposite!

Let’s see how you can get an estimate for client work without hiring a developer on Codeable.

Discuss the budget with your client

Ok, so you already have a good project brief (did you check for red flags?) in your hand and need help understanding how much that would cost so that you can let your client know.

Given that the project requests are mainly defined, you should start gathering information related to your client’s budget. Talking about a budget is never the easiest part of a project, but it’s an important aspect that should be somewhat defined right from the beginning.

If you could inquire your client by asking them something along the line of: “What’s your budget for this project? Is it above or below $X?”, that would make it a good conversation starter and it’ll keep the conversation focused on what’s important for you to know at this stage.

Your client’s current budget is an important element that allows you to get a better-informed quote from developers. If you don’t have a budget yet, do this.

Match your client’s budget to KPIs and a timeline

An effective way to talk with your clients about budgeting for their projects is linking these to KPIs and/or features that would need to be deployed.

For example, a project that costs $1,000 and is expected to bring in $5,000/$10,000 in the next 6 months sounds more appealing than one that might cost $500 but brings in only $300/$400 in the same amount of time.

The return on investment and the budget that a client might want to allocate to their project are influenced by the respective costs with regards to the time taken for it to generate returns.

By pairing KPIs to their budget and a timeline, you enable your client to see their project in perspective. WordPress developer and Codeable expert Marius Vetrici highlights:

When talking with clients, I like to bind the value their project brings in to a timeline, for example within the next 12 months. This approach helps clients with their thinking. A simple question like ‘How much money will this feature bring you during the next 12 months?’ should clarify the situation.

It is important to have this discussion with your client because it allows them to tell you what kind of money they’re willing to spend depending on the returns that the particular feature will generate.

Bigger project? Discuss the budget related to each milestone

When the project is big, i.e. it costs $5,000 and up, you might want considering breaking it into smaller milestones and ask the client about the budget for each.

As noted before, trying to pair the budget with the ROI and feature gives the right context in which this discussion should occur. It is important to have this discussion with your client because it allows them to share with how much money they’d be willing to spend in relation to what such particular feature will generate.

Splitting a bigger project into milestones and discussing them with your client allows you to manage expectations properly on one hand, while providing a more efficient flow to the development work on the other.

How to get a project estimate without hiring a developer

To recap a bit: you’re in need of a trusted WordPress developer or specialist of any sort because you have client work you can’t take care of, either completely or just part of it.

You need to get back to your client with an offer but don’t know how much it’ll cost you to hire a freelancer for that job.

That’s where everything you should have already done and prepared (what we covered earlier) comes into play.

Ready? Ok, great.

So here’s the cool thing: if you need to get an estimate from developers at Codeable, the best way is to post a project.

Posting a project is free (note: posting is free, the project delivery is not) and when you do, you can count on a no-obligation to hire policy.

This is the key factor here you should pay attention to.

Posting a project that outlines your client’s request is free for you to do. But, you need to be upfront and open on the purpose of your request: you’re looking for a ballpark estimate that will then need to be approved by your client.

Would developers start engaging to such project with no immediate hiring involved?

The answer is yes.

There are plenty of developers who understand your request is for client work. Usually, developers who are more inclined to serve agency clients are those who will start engaging with you.

Developers will not shy away from giving you an estimate even if your project states that you’re only looking for price and time figures to have them approved by your client. This is because they know that once you’ve been greenlighted by your client, you will likely come back and hire them to do the job. As Marius tells:

We understand you need to get an approval for your quote. As long as your brief is good enough and what you need to be done is clear, there will be plenty of people willing to give you a ballpark estimate. We know we’ll get hired if the estimate is approved.

How to get a precise estimate for your client work

Don’t try to exploit the platform, though: you have to be straightforward about your inquiry for ballpark figures and not actively hiring anyone at that moment.

This trait will decree what would come next: developers engaging with you to deliver you an estimate vs an unanswered request.

So how can you get a precise estimate, then?

Add client specs to your project brief

One of the important things to consider is to make sure you have a comprehensive brief prepared for the project, one that describes everything as elaborately as you’re capable of so that the developers know what they’ll have to do and provide estimates accordingly. Marius points out:

Write a few sentences about the end results that your client is trying to achieve at the beginning of the project brief and briefly share what the business is all about. This way you’ll provide your prospect developers with an informed context. Then, add the project requirements as you’d normally do.

Getting an estimate all comes down to enriching your request with as much information as you can. The more details you share, the more precise the estimate will be.

When in doubt, jump on call with the developer

In case you’re unclear about any of the technical details related to your client’s project, you aren’t doomed because you have the chance to jump on a 1-to-1 a consultation call that will likely clear doubts for you.

There are many benefits from a consultation task – how it’s called at Codeable. One of which is that you get a much simpler and clearer picture on the project details so that, at the end of the day, you can handle it much more effectively.

Wrapping up

When it comes to obtaining estimates for client work, the most effective way to get them is to engage directly with the freelance developers and/or specialists who have the right expertise for what you need to deliver.

This makes it easy for you to manage the project because you have an estimated price from the outsourced developer/specialist which, if approved, will allow you to get started on the project in a shorter time with a budget already been established. On top of that, it’ll free you from regularly explaining how the project is evolving as your client is aware already of “the big” picture.

As a business, your revenue stream is not only linked to how much work you deliver. It has also directly impacted by whether your client perceives the same value in your work that justifies how much you charge them for. If there’s a misalignment here, your client won’t be happy and they’d feel ripped off.

Leveraging the approach here outlined sets you and your business on a solid path towards properly managing your client’s expectations. And, as you’ve already realized, their money.

This blog post features Marius Vetrici, a software engineer with a Ph.D. in business informatics. As a software entrepreneur, Marius has served more than 800 small and large companies to achieve their online business goals. He is the founder of WPRiders – WordPress technical agency with a focus on your business goals.

The post How To Get An Estimate For Client Work When Outsourcing (Part Of) It appeared first on Codeable.

That’s why project management is such a critical aspect business owners should get better at. In recent years, when people or industry outlets talk about project management applied to software development, they often pair it with the concept of Agile and, more specifically, they talk about Agile Project Management, Agile Software Development, and Agile methodology.

It seems like “Agile” is all the rage when it comes to software development work. In fact, it’s such a powerful methodology that any business owner can get used to and even master in a reasonable time frame.

So what does it look like working with an outsourced WordPress developer following an Agile approach?

Let’s dig in!

Understanding what an Agile methodology is

To take advantage of Agile in your next project, it is important to first understand what the term “agile” means. Agile means flexible. When it comes to project management and software development, the term refers to fluidity in the process. It allows the entire project to be classified and executed in a way that is more efficient by dividing it into recursive cycles, with a keen focus on continuous improvement, called “sprints”.

Sprints are usually two- to four-week-long and allow an extremely productive development flow because, for example, instead of discovering problems and suggesting edits at the end of the whole project, you and your developer can become aware of them earlier and adapt right away.

That’s where the more traditional approach, often referred to as “Waterfall approach”, show its limits.

Take a look at this:

What’s the difference between Agile vs Waterfall methodology

There are many differences between an Agile approach and a Waterfall one but, as you can see from the image here, the main one relies on the fact that the Agile approach favors a smaller and incremental delivery of work, while a Waterfall-based approach focuses on delivering the project all at once. On top of that, Agile and more traditional methodologies differ on other key aspects, such as:

• Agile stands for customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Agile stands for individuals and interaction over process and tools
• Agile stands for responding to change over following a structured plan
• Agile stands for prototyping/working solutions over comprehensive documentation

Having established that an Agile approach is an effective way to handle software development projects, we now dive deeper into understanding the most efficient way in which it can be made to work.

The five pillars of an Agile approach to working with outsourced WordPress developers

There are many ways and methodologies to implement an Agile approach. Still, there are five essential pillars that support such approach to project and softwater development and, at the same time, that cater to different aspects of the entire process.

Pillar #1 of an Agile approach: Problem and requirements need to be investigated and documented before anything else

Every proper problem-solving process begins by investigating either the cause of the problem or the requirements of the feature and document them. This is important because as long as you don’t know what you have to fix, what new functionality you’re trying to build for your WooCommerce store, how are you going to successfully finish the project?

So, the first important step of Agile is understanding and documenting the implication of your request based on the current state of things. The developer starts investigating every minor detail including the issue, your requirements, your expectations, etc. WordPress developer and Codeable expert Jonathan Bossenger explains:

As the client, you’ll come to the developer with a problem. Depending on the size of the problem, the developer you’ve hired may need to spend some time investigating it, whether is an issue to fix, the requirements of a new requested feature, the root cause of a problem. Once completed, it’s the developer’s responsibility to group findings, requirements, causes, etc. in a human-readable document.

More often than not, such investigative first step is delivered through what is called a “discovery phase” or a scoping project.

Pillar #2 of an Agile approach: Evaluation of potential solutions

Once the problem has been identified, and the main project requirements have all been documented and shared with you, a starting point has been established. The next phase of the process will see your outsourced developer analyzing possible solutions that will be able to provide you with optimum results. Jonathan explains:

No one problem has one solution. There’s always the perfect solution, and given unlimited budget and time, the perfect solution might be your option. But budget might be a concern. Time might be a concern. Technology might be a concern. So, after the discovery has been done, I will then propose to the client two or three solutions based on my findings. Once the chosen solution has been picked, we need to take that solution and break it down into smaller pieces.

Pillar #3 of an Agile approach: Project has to be split into shorter life cycle stages

Planning and its related time and costs estimate is where the Agile approach really shows its difference and its value.

In fact, the third pillar entails breaking your project (aka the solution you’ve picked thanks to the developer’s suggestions) into smaller chunks, at the end of each, deliverable goals are bundled with.

Remember the concept of sprints I talked about earlier? Well, this is just them. Specifically, once a solution has been preferred over the others, your outsourced WordPress developer will split it into smaller yet meaningful sub-projects and link them to the fixed-timed development cycles. On top of that, at the end of each sprint, you’re supposed to receive a physical deliverable to test.

It could be something you could see in your browser, something you can click and test on a separate staging environment on your own. Almost anything. The important thing here is, you play a proactive part in the development process by having the change to test early and providing your developer with feedback on every piece of code they’re working on.

Wow, uh? See the effectiveness of such approach?

Pillar #4 of an Agile approach: Costs and time estimates don’t cover the project as a whole

Given all the core difference Agile brings in, you should also be aware that also costs and time estimates change drastically. Fear not, though. That’s a good news for your wallet!

Let me explain.

With other standard approaches, you’re used to preparing a project brief with some requirements, criteria, and then ask for an estimate or, if the requirements are too loosely defined or it’s a big project, you might request a ballpark estimate.

What happens next, usually? You get a project estimate covering the whole project development costs and also a timeline in which it might be developed. Something like:

This project is going to cost you this much and will take three months.

Sounds familiar? I bet it does!

If you’re following an Agile approach instead, you’ll be able to get time and costs estimates for the initial part of a project only. Sometimes, a couple more sprints can be estimated too but it’s not always the case because it’s only after a developer has started to look deeper into a matter that they’re able to estimate properly. Jonathan highlights:

Once we agree on a solution, I usually define several milestones to achieve that goal and then share it with the client as ‘To have our solution in place, we have to go through these X milestones. First I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do that,’ and so on. As for estimates, I’m only delivering estimates of costs and time for the first milestone, sometimes the second as well.

A key aspect of an Agile methodology is to request a continuous flow of project updates from the developer. This doesn’t have to be misinterpreted as checking in too many times on the developers. Yet it is the other way around: you should expect your WordPress outsourced developer to share updates with you on a recurring and ongoing basis, based on your preferences and project size.

Examples are:

• Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
• Longer weekly updates
• Short daily updates
• Weekly updates and a monthly call

Communications and updates preferences have to be defined at the earliest possible to keep the workflow as efficient as possible.

Pillar #5 of an Agile approach: Adaptability driven by continuous feedback

Testing is the phase that determines whether or not the project is on track. This is why collecting feedback through testing at end of every sprint from you – the client – is vital. It also has to be extensive so that any issues that might be present arise while they can still be fixed.

It is possible that things don’t work out the way you expected. Or, it could be the case that you realize a certain solution isn’t solving the issue as you hoped in the first place. Thanks to proper testing you perform regularly, things can easily be altered midway and then steered into a direction that makes productive results possible. Jonathan tells that this is important because:

Another great thing about the Agile approach, is the client gets to test the project early on. And they get to see how it’s going, and how it’s working. Does it solve the problem that they set out for it to solve? And has anything changed in the course of this development that we need to deal with? With Agile, we can answer all these answers and act accordingly when things change.

Wrapping up

When working with an outsourced WordPress developer, efficiency has to be your Northern star.

Embracing an Agile methodology and approach helps you streamline otherwise haphazard operations. You – the client – have the ability to provide feedback during project phases and improve aspects that are not working out as they should. In addition, you get to be directly involved in each stage of the project, right from the earliest ones and get to test solutions regularly, rather than waiting for the whole project to complete.

Project management is an important business skill set on its own. It’s crucial. But it’s combining it with an Agile methodology that will allow an even higher level of seamless planning, execution, and delivery of project goals.

This blog post features Jonathan Bossenger, a freelance web consultant, developer, writer and podcaster. He is a big supporter of open source software due to its ability to change the world around it. For the past 13 years, he has gathered expertise in all facets of the software development lifecycle, from devops to project management, and everything in between.

The post How To Use An Agile Development Approach When Working With An Outsourced WordPress Developer appeared first on Codeable.

In a digital world, it’s a daily thing to fight with things moving and change at a different pace than the one dictated by those procedures we’ve implemented and are trying to follow. This fast-paced environment has not only to do with the way you manage your own organization and project workflows but also it impacts how your client will perceive your work.

For example, there’s a high chance a client of yours would need to retouch their budget for a project when they’re told something along the line of

We strongly advise to do a discovery phase.

It’s up to you, though, to convince them your work is still worth that updated amount of money. To make things even more complicated, in that scenario, new estimated delivery dates, different resource allocations, more meetings, and calls are likely to occur.

Here’s the point:

Having a set of rules and methodologies that help you set expectations more correctly, help you manage your work in a more effective way, and help you deliver on time is a critical business asset.

As part of our broad business mission here at Codeable is to help online business thrive, it’s our duty to shed some light on such a tough (and vast) topic such as project management.

If you haven’t embraced a Project Management Methodology (PMM) in your business yet, or have some rules in place but not in a properly structured format, you might be wondering:

• Where should I start from?
• What do I need to understand before picking one for my organization?
• What features should a PMM have to be a good fit?

Let’s start with one of the shortest ways that perfectly explains what you should look for, in this PMM quest you’re into right now. I like how Ben Aston, digital project manager and VP of Client Services at FCV, sums it up:

The best methodology is one that’s continually and organically improving, adapting and through strong collaboration increases the value of the output so the sum is much greater than the parts.

No matter which methodology you’ll end up with, your PMM should continually improve, adapt and bring to you more value when it comes to the desired outcome.

But wait, you might wonder:

How embracing a PMM could help run my business better?

Top 4 benefits of a proper Project Management Methodology

There are several aspects that will improve through a PMM properly set in place, but these following are the most immediate and deep improvements you could gain. Specifically, I’m talking about:

1. Improved efficiency

With a more structured approach to managing work and requests from clients, you’ll be better at planning and reduce variances in project results/delivery because you’ll be able to streamline and optimize processes along with a decreased room for guess and uncertainty. This will give you an edge over client management expectations as well.

2. Better risk assessment

Risk assessment is another important aspect that you’ll be able to improve on. With an improved planning and a more controlled project environment, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of the type of risks you might be facing, along with being able to foresee their possible consequences and prepare up front.

3. Better resources management (in-house and outsourced)

An increased efficiency in delivering work and a better resources management level are two sides of the same coin. Leveraging a PMM in your business would make your life easier when it comes to assessing what types of resources you’ll be needing for a given project by providing you with insights on how many you can count on (or are short of) and how to better allocate them.

4. More control over project phases

By implementing a more organized action plan, along with all these other benefits, you’ll get more control over the entire process. This will allow you to anticipate questions coming from your clients for example. But that’s not just it. Let’s think about this other one: with an adopted set of structured rules to follow for each project you need to deliver, you could easily spot where bottlenecks or hiccups occur and act immediately to get everything back on track.

These four major benefits of implementing a proper PMM should already be enough to convince you of the important role that Project Management can play into a digital business.

But things get tougher now:

It’s time to choose a Project Management Methodology (PMM) out of the many that currently are available.

I won’t go into big details as this would fall out of the scope of this post, which is explaining how important PM is and what possibilities you have before you. I’ll dig more into the most adopted PMM by digital endeavors in future blog posts.

Ok, then. Time to pick a PMM that works for you, your team and of course your business. But where should you start from? How many PMM are there to choose from?

Well, let’s put on hold which one is the best fit for your company (for now) and let’s look at a list of well-known PMM you could choose from.

Project Management Methodology list:

• Waterfall Method
• Critical chain project management
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Scrumban
• Extreme Programming
• Adaptive Project Framework
• Event Chaing Methodology
• Extreme Project Management
• PRiSM
• Lean
• 6 Sigma
• Prince2

Overwhelming, uh? I agree with you. And this list doesn’t account for all PMM that are currently available.

So out of all these, which ones should grab your attention? Which ones should you invest more time to master and implement eventually?

What to look for in a Project Management Methodology

As Moira Alexander, author of “LEAD or LAG: Linking Strategic Project Management & Thought Leadership”, points out in this useful graphic, there are several criteria along with their sub-criteria you should take into account.

When trying to assess whether a PMM is good for your business or not, you should examine different subjects and aspects that are involved with your organization both internally and externally:

How to find out if a PMM is a good fit for your organization

To find out whether a PMM is going to be a good fit (or not), you ultimately should question some behaviors, procedures, or communication flows that usually are taken for granted and have probably never be challenged on a management level. Well, now it’s the perfect time to revise them.

There are further questions that will help you find an answer in your research for a PMM to use. Specifically:

• Do your stakeholders prefer a particular methodology?

By questioning aspects that usually aren’t, you’ll start gaining a clearer idea of how different subjects are connected within your company. And one of them could be whether or not there are already preferences for a specific “system” to adopt over another. If that’s the case, what are the reasons behind it? What put its implementation on hold? What are the main concerns that stopped it from being adopted? You should be aware and gather all these types of information because when/if you’ll be suggesting to start using a new PMM, you’d have to bring in solid arguments on the table.

Moving forward…

• How involved do your clients want/need to be in the work?

By asking this question you’re trying to define what type of approach and how deep their level of involvement will be when it come to your clients. The answer varies extremely to such a question because it’s inevitably dependent on the type of relationship and client management process you’ve been following since today and the one you’d want to have in place in the future.

• Is it flexible enough?

In your PMM discovery and assessment process, you should try to find a PMM that is flexible enough in its deployment to be able to cover a project type but, with some adaptations and refinements, could work for others as well. Even if there’s no “one size, fits all” solution, the PMM you’ll end up with should be able to address the majority of your needs with minor and quick changes.

• How steep is going to be the learning curve?

As with any new thing inside your business, there’s always some learning required. And the more complex your organization is, the longer it will get for the whole company to make it their own. New processes, new requirements to be followed, new roles in some cases, but also a whole new terminology that might sound obscure to some, are elements you have to take into account at this stage of the research.

Wrapping up

Each Project Management Methodology features its own strengths but also its weaknesses. Picking one it’s really a hard task from a business perspective because its impact will be affecting your organization as a whole. By revolutionizing your business internally, with new workflows and practices, you’ll modify how you manage your clients, your outcomes, your costs, your resources management eventually. And that’s a huge business leap.

Knowing this might put you into a freeze mode, where you’re a bit worried whether adopting a better project management system is even worth it, based on all the things is related to that could go wrong. That’s completely understandable.

But there’s something you’re missing here: through this research and assessment process for a useful PMM, you’re aiming to improve your overall efficiency, and your entire business outcome we could even say. And this is something that’s always worth pursuing.

The post Project Management For Digital Businesses: How To Choose A Project Management Methodology That Suits Your Company appeared first on Codeable.

The WordPress market is no different. Although with some caveats: outsourcing WordPress development – or any other type of work – has a substantial catch to it because, with the ever-increasing number of options, it’s hard for a business owner to pick the right partner. I always like to say:

Outsourcing sits on a 3-legged stool of trust, quality, and deliverability.

To take advantage of it, you’d need to feel confident and reassured you’ll be working with world-class professionals, not simply someone who says they’re professionals. Someone who can be trusted and provides you with personal support if things go south. Someone who will deliver all you’ve agreed on, at the right time.

But there’s more to that.

Top 5 business benefits from outsourcing WordPress development work

Merging outsourced developers with your current in-house team opens up your business to several big wins such as:

1. Quickly address client work requests
2. Work with highly-skilled specialists you don’t have in-house
3. Cut down costs
4. Scale your client work intake
5. Improve specific areas of your own business faster

Now that we have the theory in the know, I’d like to support it with 3 real-life examples of different businesses that successfully outsourced different projects (or part of them) so that you get to see how it all works.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in!

Example #1: Custom search feature for a leading Italian tile retailer

The first example is of a large Italian tile retailer, Versace Ceramics, that wanted to have a custom product search feature built into their website.

The agency working with them in all marketing and development matters was lacking the technical knowledge to handle the task because they didn’t understand how to integrate their very complex range of products in the appropriate manner following the client’s request. WordPress developer and Codeable expert Marius Vetrici explains:

At first, we had to work with them side by side. We were like thinking partners where we helped them structure all of their products in the right way. Then, based on the new structure, we built a custom plugin for them which added the type of search they needed. This custom functionality allowed Versace Ceramics to provide their users with similar suggested products, different types of categories and featured products based on a given category.

Major benefits in example #1

The client got access to experienced developers who supported them from the start by digging deeper into the problem. They took care of the business analysis, as well as the development process, and delivered a custom WordPress solution able to address their business needs.

Example #2: Real-time quote calculator based on Gravity Form for an American t-shirt business

The second example is about Orange Halo, an American business that specializes in selling printed t-shirts.

Before deciding to have an automated solution for users’ inquiries, they used to receive price requests via email and then run the numbers based on an extensive Excel spreadsheet. They had a freelancer working alongside them for quite some time but then they decided to build a quote calculator that ensured clients could be provided with estimates instantly. Recalls Marius:

We started from their Excel file. We had to clean it up and straightened the math as well. Once we had all the formulas in place correctly, we went up and turned them all into a real-time quote calculator which would ask the relevant questions, provide options, and give answers on the spot.

Major benefits in example #2

By having a 0-latency quote calculator on their store, the number of conversions and UX improved greatly. Additionally, the client no longer needs to invest time or in-house resources among email requests, Excel files, and client requests.

Example #3: Question-powered checkout process for an American subscription-based business

The third example is about Gleam for Life. They deal in dental supplies for families. Ok, nothing fancy here, I know. The twist is in how they sell their service: they offer subscriptions so that customers can choose when and how many supplies they want and place recurring orders that are then delivered to them at specified intervals.

By offering different types of products, delivery preferences, and subscription tiers, the company was looking for an easier and more efficient way to hand-hold their customers during their buying process. And that’s where a guided checkout process proved to be the right solution: it improved the overall buying experience without leaving out all the needed information to sell subscriptions. As Marius highlights:

We’ve been contacted by the digital agency working with them. The final result is a wizard-like type of checkout where there are multiple steps involved to gather different information from customers in a nice and smooth manner. This custom solution had to relate different types of products, different types of subscription options, different types of deliverability preferences and payment as well.

Major benefits in example #3

Even though the company was relying on an agency to get help, they were still walking in the dark in relation to an advanced and complex scenario. By involving Marius and his team, the company had the chance to take advantage of specialists’ experience and bundle it with in-house resources.

Wrapping up

The world of WordPress development is vast and complicated. And it might even look frightening to some business owners for, deep down, when we delegate something we care about to someone else, we all feel like we’re losing control of it. Specifically, working with outsourced developers, who can easily be located in remote places from your headquarters, amplifies this idea and make you see a blank wall.

How do you usually overcome being stuck, then? You’ll find solid reasons not to be. And when it comes to outsourcing development, your research ends when you’ll find developers who you can trust.

This blog post features Marius Vetrici, a software engineer with a Ph.D. in business informatics. As a software entrepreneur, Marius has served more than 800 small and large companies to achieve their online business goals. He is the founder of WPRiders – WordPress technical agency with a focus on your business goals.

The post 3 Successful Outsourcing Examples That Changed The Way These Businesses Operate appeared first on Codeable.

On a purely business perspective, geographical borders are often a limit to growth and efficacy. Because of this peculiar feature of working with freelance developers, often projects happen between subjects living in different countries or even continents.

The biggest issue that arises in this regard is that you and the developer you have outsourced to are most probably located in different time zones. This can be an incredible inconvenience to both sides and cause hassles that result in a loss of productivity and effectiveness.

So what do you need to know about time zones to make the best out of them for your WordPress projects?

Pros of working with a developer in a different time zone than yours

Let’s start with a real-world scenario: you have a new your project that needs to be addressed now, and you’re in need of the best candidate to take care of it.

It might be the case that in your local area there are no WooCommerce experts, or performance specialists, or security professionals available you could reach out to.

What do you do, then? You look for a freelance developer.

Since your goal is to move things forward, your research for the perfect candidate shouldn’t be limited to your local area or personal network. Therefore, where your outsourced developer will be based shouldn’t matter that much either.

That’s just one of the pros of working with remote professionals. On top of that, if you work with freelance developers in different time zones, you’ll also benefit from having an ongoing flow of work that you could hardly recreate with someone in your own time zone.

Think of companies with 24/7 support or those with a continuous development cycle where you send requests by the end of your day and the developer picks it up in their morning (when you’re about to call it a day). We’ll see more of this in a second.

The third and great benefit of working with someone located in a different country, and likely a different time zone, is the cultural freshness they bring in. A different culture often means a different perspective on life and, more often than not, on job-related aspects.

To sum up, here’s the list of pros of working with a developer in a different time zone than yours:

1. No geographical limits to hiring the best candidates and specialists
2. Uninterrupted project development
3. New ideas and fresh perspectives from a different culture

Unfortunately, when working with freelance developers, there are some cons as well you’ll need to be aware of. Fear not – you can overcome all of them with good communication skills (which is something you can start improving today)!

Cons of working with a developer in a different time zone than yours

Working with a professional not only outside your office but also in a different time zone than the one you’re currently in, can be challenging for some business owners.

Why that? The main reason is, even though you always knew communication is important in your work, you had never had the chance to actually test how that assumption happens to be true. In fact, working with developers and any other professionals in a different time zone brings up all implications of remote work plus asynchronous communications and flows of work.

Working with developers in a different time zone than yours requires communication and organizational skills from your part. If you lack them, your project could get delayed, your developer might deliver something different from what you have in mind, and so on.

To sum up, here’s the list of cons of working with a developer in a different time zone than yours:

1. if you suck at communication, you’re delaying your project (+ meetings will be hard)
2. if there’s no good planning, working will be hard and poor
3. there’s going to be little to none constant collaboration

How to find out your developer’s time zone

Let’s start by clearing the air around where you developer’s currently based. You can simply do that by picking a developer’s location and put it on one of the many free tools. The one I use is called World Time Buddy (WTB):

Just add your city and your developer’s in the top-left search box, and you’ll get to see how your time zones overlap. That’s the very first step when considering to hire a remote (WordPress) developer.

Now, here’s where the game gets funnier…

How to decide on a developer’s time zone: behind vs ahead vs your local time

It is important to give ample considerations to choosing developers from the best suited time zones.

The first choice you might think about should be someone within your own GMT. But that’s your best choice only at certain times; it is possible that you find a more interesting opportunity elsewhere. In such cases, it is imperative to give time zones, and their difference, a considerable thought.

As WordPress developer and Codeable expert Jonathan Bossenger highlights here:

When you are working across different time zones, it’s really important that you understand what time zone you’re in so that you understand the difference in the time delay.

Let’s have a look at the three options you have:

• Option a): the developer is ahead of your time zone
• Option b): the developer is behind of your time zone
• Option c): the developer is in your time zone

Option a) – Working with a developer ahead of your time zone

The favorable outcome that comes out of working across time zones is when you’re working with a developer who is six to eight hours ahead of you.

For example, if you’re based in New York, US a developer based in Europe might be an ideal choice. This is because as they end their work day, you’re only halfway through yours meaning that they can effectively send you updates on your projects and you can have an overlapping, working time zone to interact and work things out seamlessly.

Explains Jonathan:

I’m Cape Town, South Africa and all of my US-based clients are between six to eight hours behind me. That means at the end of my day I can send them an update, and I can send them some finished piece of functionality, and they can spend the other half of their day testing that functionality and sending me feedback. Then I can log on the next day and I can start working on that feedback, fixing bugs, making changes, and so on.

The great benefit here is the constant flow of work which almost never stops between the involved parties. Specifically, by working with a developer ahead of your time zone could help you set up a routine where your day starts with an update about the project already in your inbox to look at so that you have your day to review it and send feedback back to your developer right before they start their day.

Option b) – Working with a developer behind of your time zone

What if your best candidate developer lives hours behind your current time zone? Well, theoretically nothing major changes: if you need to have daily status updates on your project, your developer could send them when they end their end their workday so that you’ll find them the next day in your inbox.

I should warn you, though, that working with someone behind of your current time zone requires additional planning to be done up front as you’ll need to take into account all of the project details you can think of to prevent any delays.

It takes some training, but the benefits of working with developers in different time zones than yours have a greater impact than the annoyance of doing some more planning you’re requested to do.

Wait so… does that mean hiring developers in your own time zone has little value? No, it does not!

Option c) – Working with a developer in your time zone: better suited for urgent work (but not exclusively)

Even though the quality and professionality of a developer should be the first aspects you hire them for, there’s also another one that has to do with the time you have planned around your project deliverables.

In other words: urgency. As Jonathan comments:

The basis of the choice sometimes is the amount of time you have. That’s why, if time is a concern, find someone in a similar time zone, especially if your work is urgent because it’s easier to quickly send a message and, if there’s any clarification needed, the response can happen within a few hours.

Urgency can be mitigated with a detailed project brief and a solid preparation in advance of all other additional information your developer will ask you to provide. Time-sensitive projects can also be managed with developers located in different time zones, it’s a matter of how comfortable you are with an asynchronous workflow.

4 aspects to embrace to get the most out of a developer working in a different time zone than yours

The hardest part isn’t working with someone in your same time zone, although some further communications and planning are required than in a common per-person working relationship.

When working with developers in different time zones, as most of the work happens in a non-linear way, you should always have the impression of over-communicating to convey your requests properly. This allows the process to be streamlined and executed in the most efficient manner.

There are some important factors you should keep top of mind in this regard. Let’s see them!

1. Deeply understand that you’re in different time zones

It is important that you understand the difference in time zones quite clearly. Be sure that you have your developer’s respective working hours figured and have communicated yours to them as well.

This allows you to keep appropriate expectations of when you’ll be receiving updates and when you’ll have to respond to them. Jonathan highlights:

When working across time zones, it is important to be as detailed as possible with your communication because there is going to be a large chunk of time between communications, you can’t simply waste time clarifying things.

If you miss doing so, there’s going to be an enormous communication gap in certain situations along with expectations not being properly set up and managed. It is better to be as descriptive in the problems that you’re having or the feature you want to build as possible, rather than wasting time with unclear requests or feedback that might be misunderstood.

2. Be considerate when planning meetings

This is another vital aspect to consider when working with someone outside your time zone. Each individual is different in terms of their brain working capacities. There are certain individuals who are up and active at 7 am, while there are people who might wake up at 9 am but only feel fit to work only after noon.

Although this might not be the most common behavior, it is important for you to be aware of and consider it in your communication flow. Jonathan summarizes:

When you’re booking meetings or calls with your developer, plan a meeting at a time that doesn’t just fit your schedule, but also fits both your productivity level.

Either a developer who is tired after a long day at work or yourself won’t be much help and, as a result, your project will suffer.

3. Have the term “End of the day” clearly defined

“End of the day” is a term that needs a proper definition for both sides because it will determine and clear a lot of expectations that exist among you and an outsourced developer. The term “end of the day” might be different for each individual, for instance, a developer might refer to end of the day when they go to sleep because they like to take work home and sort major problems that might occur from there.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll always be available and here an effective communication becomes a necessity from both sides. Jonathan points out:

In an outsourced environment, specifically for a freelance developer, “End of the day” is a variable thing. It doesn’t always mean a specific time. That’s why you need to define and agree on it up front.

4. Discuss project updates, feedback, responses up front with the developer

No matter what aspects and considerations are discussed, it all gravitates around defining and agreeing on a common communication and updates flow with your developer. Some examples are:

• How frequently do you need project updates? Daily, hourly, weekly…
• How can you reach out to the developer if an emergency occurs? Here you’ll also need to define what an emergency is
• How long should you wait before sending another request to the developer?
• When will your developer be online? How does that relate to your workday?
• (more…)

It is important that you ask the developer and clearly define what type of conversation you’re having with them and how quickly you expect them to respond. Similarly, you need to ask them what work they’re performing and what their availability is and how conveniently they might be able to send messages back to you.

Defining the parameters of communication and clearly sharing what your expectations are across time zones is crucial.

Wrapping up

Working effectively with outsourced developers who are situated in different time zones can be somewhat of a hassle depending on the respective time zone that they’re in and your work schedule.

For urgent projects, your first choice should be better to hire someone in your same time zone to take advantage of a greater time span in which you and the developer are both working.

Nevertheless, working with freelance developers isn’t a matter of where they’re located, rather how a good fit they are for your project. By getting used to these fundamentals concepts, you’ll start taking advantage of this efficient working paradigm, the only one empowered with an around-the-clock focus on what you care most about: your project outcomes.

This blog post features Jonathan Bossenger, a freelance web consultant, developer, writer and podcaster. He is a big supporter of open source software due to its ability to change the world around it. For the past 13 years, he has gathered expertise in all facets of the software development lifecycle, from devops to project management, and everything in between.

The post The Productivity-Driven Guide To Working With WordPress Developers In Different Time Zones appeared first on Codeable.

That’s where leveraging outsourced developers comes into play. Many agency owners integrate freelance developers into their workflows on a variety of occasions and they do that with an interesting goal in mind: improve their outcomes and their business margins.

Scaling an agency business is a hard topic to discuss for it’s strictly connected to your current scenario, your market position, your available resources, and your approach to business. Yet, there are core principles that apply to the vast majority of agencies and that can be really helpful for you, no matter how big or young your business is today.

So, how can you increase your agency margins without changing your prices?

Scaling a business means being productive and efficient on three fronts

You should pursue better productivity and improved efficiency.

These might seem quite basic recommendations about nothing special. However, most of the time it is the basics that are neglected by agency owners caused extensive damage in the long term. WordPress developer and Codeable expert Paul Cohen elaborates:

It’s common sense but you’d be surprised how often we’re not following these core principles and get distracted. Nowadays it is happening more than ever with distracting activities like social media acting as a time waster.

To do that you need to take action on three main areas of your business: Project and Product Management processes, communication tools, and automation.

1. Project and Product Management

It all starts with better procedures and processes.

Project Management encompasses every single detail of the project from the client’s knowledge to their objectives and techniques, while Product Management is focused on designing the right product for the customer. As Paul explains:

Roughly speaking, Project Management is the process of development. Product Management, on the other hand, is the process of developing the right product, the right website. They’re interrelated but separate processes, like two cogs in a gear assembly.

Being productive and efficient with respect to these two areas requires an agency owner to deal with different and connected matters in a sensitive and timely manner. Opting for the most efficient and effective development workflows, asking the right questions, and determining appropriate deliverables and milestones enable you to keep hold of the process and the costs involved. Paul comments:

In terms of project management methodologies, if your clients are very clear and they have an existing business, then you can almost do a waterfall project management methodology, which is still valid in certain contexts, because you’re able to do all the requirements up front with a little bit of iteration. That will allow you to estimate much more efficiently. If your client’s request is more open-ended or they don’t really know what they want that’s the value of using a more agile or rapid prototyping iterative method of development.

There are many Project Management methodologies to choose from and your choice should be driven by the type of clients and projects you usually work with. Some of the questions that might help you here are:

• What’s the type of product/website your client is asking? Is your client’s website a marketing website or is it an eCommerce website? Maybe a rental site?
• Have your client shared product website examples, tone of voice, and visual patterns to consider?
• What’s your client’s awareness level? Do they know what they want/need? What’s their background?
• To what degree do your clients have experience in that business area? Is it a new idea that they’re trying?
• What’s their in-house resources availability?
• What’s the budget?
• What’s the timeline?

An important part of improved workflows is played by highly-skilled outsourced developers who know what they’re doing. They might cost more but they can deliver a better product faster with higher quality so that there should be fewer downstream issues.

2. Communication tools and processes

Efficiency in communications comes from streamlining processes and tools adoption. Having clear lines of command and communication channels and then utilizing them in the most productive ways possible should be the precise way forward. As Paul also brings to our attention:

You increase agency margins by being productive and efficient. And that has also to do with tools you have and how you use them. I’m talking about everything: from the right GitHub client instead of a command line, what development processes you’re running, how far you’ve standardized tools among all your developers, etc. If you focus on making these flows of communications more efficient, theoretically it means you have a better process.

The lesson to draw here is that, at a higher level, you should be looking at minimizing friction among all parties involved.

3. Automation

Another area that might be worth investing is automating repetitive tasks. Think of how much time you could gain back if you were able to automate these tasks:

• Backups for your client’s websites
• Plugin and theme updates
• Performance monitoring
• Application performance monitoring
• Server monitoring
• Analytics reporting
• SEO reporting

The list could be endless.

If you really want to take it to the next level, automating your repetitive tasks goes hand in hand with leveraging what’s usually called “retainers”, which are fixed-scope tasks you outsource to freelance developers and pay for a fixed price. This way, you free time on your end and still are in control of the process and the final outcome.

Wrapping up

You won’t believe how such basic truths aren’t embraced by many agency owners who say they’d like to grow their business.

The fundamentals are important more than anything else. If you want to increase your margins, without touching your pricing strategy, you need to be “brilliant at the basics”, as one of the longest winning NFL coach Vince Lombardi used to say.

Being brilliant at the basics means trying to do everything you can to improve these three fronts of your business so that you’ll be able to juice out higher margins.

At the end of the day, it’s all about focusing on and increasing efficiency in all your processes. An important aspect that stands out is that increasing margins doesn’t necessarily mean cutting costs at every possible step. Sometimes, spending more means investing in greater returns because this allows long-term gains and minimizes your chance of having issues in the near future.

This blog post features Paul Cohen, a hands-on technology strategy consultant with 20+ years international experience on a variety of projects including WordPress, Enterprise IT, web/mobile applications, eLearning simulations, educational apps/games in teams of all sizes. He’s also a creative technologist who understands the business, product, project, design, and development aspects involved in taking ideas from concept to realization.

The post 3 Core Areas To Increase Your Agency Margins Without Touching Your Pricing Strategy appeared first on Codeable.

As common as this might sound to you running your agency business, however, it can turn out to be a cause of concern for many of your clients on many fronts.

Clients are usually people with minimum technical knowledge (it’s not required for their role) and an agency outsourcing work sets off a number of red flags for them.

Is the company not qualified enough to handle the work on their own?
How are things going to turn out at the end?
Will I waste my money with this agency?

These are just some of the most common concerns that might be going on in your client’s mind.

And here exactly is where you’re faced with a crossroad:

Will you tell the client about outsourced developers or would you just avoid it completely and simply outsource the work without the client know?

For an agency that believes in the core principles of business and transparency, this is not something that is to be recommended. In fact, obscurity never wins over transparency in business relationships.

Still, that’s a huge issue many agency owners experience and can’t decide which path they should take.

Let’s delve into this matter and see how you could turn it around in your favor.

Where does your client’s fear come from?

If you make it clear that you’ll be involving outsourced, “external” developers working on your client’s project, it might be the case that some of them will raise their eyebrow and won’t feel 100% confident to hand their project to your agency.

Why is that happening? Why is a client concerned if outsourced developers will be – or won’t be – involved in their project?

Setting aside all sales technique someone might have up their sleeves, there’s a profound reason for a client to be somewhat hesitant: lack of trust. Specifically, lack of trust in those new subjects they’re hearing about now and whom they’ve never talked to. Your clients are afraid they will not get the best outcome possible. Sometimes, clients feel they’re getting tricked or even scammed. As WordPress developer and Codeable expert Paul Cohen highlights:

When it comes to outsourcing, clients are concerned because they simply don’t trust these new developers. And, to an extent, I don’t blame them and understand their point well because I’ve heard this from other developers too. What I think, though, is that there are already enough issues when you’re doing the development directly without lying about what you’re doing. I see no real good reason to do that with your clients.

Building trust should be the first priority on your list when talking to a client. Thanks to it you’ll be able to mitigate their concerns, if not address them completely.

Communication gives rise to trust. Once a client sees the effort that you’re putting into keeping their concerns at a minimum, they start to confide in you and believe that you’re the right pick for the job.

If you don’t do it and keep it a secret, you’re settling for project failure.

Failure to be transparent about outsourced developers causes projects to fail

A substantial chunk of web development projects fails due to a lack of effective communication, which has a direct impact on trust of course. Hiding a vital piece of information like the outsourcing part of it also falls under this banner. As Paul shared with me his valuable insights on this aspect:

Communication is the biggest point of failure in any project, we know that from project management studies and product management. Business owners not properly talking to their users, clients not talking to the developers, product managers not talking customers. That happens across the whole spectrum of businesses, where getting clarity on communication is key.

If, for whatever reason, the flow of communications stops or breaks down, the level of trust in your agency and its ability to provide the right solutions will start to decrease in your client’s mind, shaking the whole environment in which all parties engage. And that could open the door to misunderstandings, unexpected issues, and even a working relationship going awry.

So how could you craft the perfect communications and overall message flow to inform your clients that you might be working with outsourced developers, all without undermining your work (and price)?

It might sound naive, but the answer is telling them in detail all about your value. Here’s how to do that.

Tell the client openly what’s the real value they’re getting from you

I get it: you’re worried that if you tell your clients you’re working with outsourced developers, they’ll expect a lower end price from you or simply go away because they don’t trust your business.

If we set aside the trusting issue, you’re left with a client possibly demanding a lower price because some of the developers involved aren’t your employees and, in your client’s mind, they all work from remote countries for insanely low hourly rates.

But if you look at it a bit closer, you’ll start noticing that being afraid of telling about outsourced developers is closer to having to deal with clients demanding discounted price rather than a higher-level business matter.

As you’ve been dealing and handling client requests about price since day 1 in your business, you should be less concerned because you’ve been doing this your whole business life. You just didn’t realize it before.

So, what’s the best way to explain – justify, if you want – your price to a client? Yep, showing your value. Overwhelm them with details and examples of how your business, and even you directly, can take care of their requests. As Paul elaborates:

A real professional will be able to communicate to a client what their skill set is, how they can help their client, how they will take care of their project management or product management aspects. For example, I’d say: ‘My skills set is determining what your pain points are and coming up with the next steps to follow, so running and doing what’s known as the discovery process. Then, once we know what I need, I know where to go and find the best developers and I know how to communicate with them and I know how to create a good brief.

Your focus should be on highlighting the things that you as the agency owner/professional are able to put in place and deliver. Is that an in-depth experience in developing WooCommerce extensions? Maybe it’s your eye and background as a former UX designer? Maybe it is that you’re a great Project Manager and can coordinate all subjects involved minimizing frictions, not matter if in-house, outsourced or both.

The idea here is to share this type of information pertaining to your business up front so that you make it understandable to your clients. It is of utmost importance that you take the client on board and clearly mention what your competencies but also limitations are. This avoids any hassles and disagreements over the course of the project collaboration.

Not every client is going to be your client (and that’s good for you)

Of course, there will always be clients that are never satisfied whatever you might do. And these clients are not advisable to work with, and you should try to anticipate them and lower the chances for your business to engage with them, whether through a list of defining questions, a discovery call, some automated funnel. Anything. As Paul points out:

There is always a percentage of clients, no matter how well you do, who won’t understand and appreciate your value. You can’t simply please everybody. And there is a small portion as well that goes bad no matter how good you are. Cut that off ahead of the curve and pick up those risk signals and act on them immediately.

Wrapping up

To tell, or not to tell, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind of an agency owner…

Transparency always trumps obscurity. And in a business world that gravitates around Open Source software, that’s the perfect – even though not mandatory – approach an agency owner should be embracing.

It’s even more than that, no matter if outsourced developers are even involved or mentioned. It’s a business law: when engaging with a client, you should focus on building trust and a cooperative flow of clear communication among parties, all the times.

By focusing and explaining your true value, the way the outsourced developers will play an important role in the client’s project, you’ll be shifting your focus on getting better at managing client expectations, rather than finding ways (and excuses) to keep them in the dark.

Besides that, it’s a matter of how good you are at finding the right outsourced developer for a given type of project and how good they are at delivering quality work for your agency.

But that’s something you need to get better at, not your clients.

This blog post features Paul Cohen, a hands-on technology strategy consultant with 20+ years international experience on a variety of projects including WordPress, Enterprise IT, web/mobile applications, eLearning simulations, educational apps/games in teams of all sizes. He’s also a creative technologist who understands the business, product, project, design, and development aspects involved in taking ideas from concept to realization.

The post The Agency Owner’s Conundrum: Should I Tell My Clients I’m Using Outsourced Developers On Their Project? appeared first on Codeable.

Here’s how it all usually begins…

Finding the product/market fit is very hard

You’ve got an idea for a new online business, you’ve set aside some money and you are eager to get started. But how can you maximize your chances of succeeding with your new venture? How can you avoid the mistakes I made without squandering a fortune and actually get nothing in return?

There are many things you’d need to get aligned before you’ll have a successful business backed up by your website. When we talk about complex websites that power your business, one of the most important things here is to find the sweet spot within:

1. What website features your market needs
2. What website features you think your market needs
3. How much you can afford to spend on building the key features of your website

For example, if we talk about an eCommerce website that sells air cleaning devices, you might want to answer questions as:

• Does your market require a product comparison feature on the website?
• Does your market need to see similar product recommendations?
• Does your market require an air cleaner sizing calculator based on the room size?
• Does your market require product filtering by price, brand, color and rooms size or maybe other attributes?
• Does your market need to pay with Bitcoin or only with a Credit Card?

The list could go on.

But if you build a smaller-scale website, which starts satisfying a decent number of customers, that’s the moment when your business is fitting your market. Better said: that’s when you are finding the product/market fit.

Speaking about building websites in general, you’ll need the answers to the following questions:

• How do you know whether a feature is crucial and needs to be included on your website?
• Is it just a nice-to-have feature?
• Will this new feature move you towards a better website? Will it just be a “distraction” in your website development, thus make you waste money?
• How do you know in which order you should build features?

Note: the order is important because there will be a cutoff on your capacity related to building your website and you need to ship a useful website and start selling before you run out of money.

The approach I’m talking today about shows you how to build a Minimum Viable Product using WordPress and a Scrum-inspired Agile approach.

What’s a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?

When you are a small business owner, there are several ways to test whether your idea could work and be of interest to prospect customers. The one I think it’s the most effective is to see if there’s some traction for your idea. Specifically, this approach is based on actually deploying a very simple, stripped-down version of your website with just enough features to satisfy early customers. The goal is to get valuable feedback for your future development.

This set of “just enough features” is your Minimum Viable Product and your first stage for ensuring you have product/market fit. However, this is easier said than done. See Figure 1 for a visual representation:

Let me explain the Venn diagram a bit more.

What your market needs (green circle) – this set has all the features that your market would ever need to solve a particular problem on your website. It includes both crucial as well as nice-to-have features. Most of the time, even your market is not aware of the features it needs 🙂 That’s why you need to work hard to uncover them.

What you think the market needs (blue circle) – if you are like me, you’ll assume there are a lot of needed features on the website and the overall set might be bigger than what your market actually needs. Please note that there are some features your market needs which you are not aware of yet. Therefore, there’s only a partial overlapping of the green and blue circles.

What you can afford to build (yellow circle) – you certainly don’t have an infinite amount of money to spend on building your website. Most of the times, this circle will be smaller than what your market needs. But hey, don’t despair, your market needs both crucial as well as nice-to-have features, so you might want to focus on the crucial features and spend less money.

Your Minimum Viable Product – MVP (the red area) – it’s the set of features that makes your website take off. Therefore, your mission here is to find out what those “just enough” features are for you to start generating some traction. Quick ways to measure traction could be the number of visits to your website or landing page, form submissions, the number of downloads or even payments.

How an MVP will maximize your Return on Investment (ROI) of your website

To paraphrase Albert Einstein:

Your WordPress-based MVP should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

In business terms, an MVP will maximize your Return on Investment (ROI) by providing you with:

• Early visibility over the website that you intend to build
• Better prioritization for what must be built first
• Information about what doesn’t have to be built
• Relevant feedback about the core features in your first website release
• Relevant feedback about the features you intend to build in the next 3-6 months

As you will learn all the above only by building an MVP website, this will be much cheaper and faster than building the full solution in the first stance. You will get results and relevant feedback at a fraction of the budget used for building the full-featured website in one shot.

Are you working on your MVP website? Hire Marius Vetrici and his team to benefit from the Agile WordPress development approach!

Examples of WordPress-based MVP websites

Now that we’ve got the “theory” done, I’d like to share with you some WordPress-based examples of minimum viable products that I’ve personally worked on:

www.caregivercareers.com, a Caregiver Job Search website. Initially, it started out as a WordPress-based with WooCommerce Subscription website. It was a relatively quick build. But later on, as the business matured, the website owner kept the website on WordPress but switched the subscriptions to Infusionsoft CRM.

www.luxurybuystoday.com, a Social CRM website for lead generation. This website was built on WordPress for a faster launch. At the same time, there’s been a second team working on a larger Laravel-based project with 10x more features. The WordPress-based MVP project’s goal was to start generating leads and getting early feedback from customers, which would all help to lead the development of the bigger project.

www.babaa.me, this was a WordPress-powered concierge service for the Brazilian market. The initial WordPress-based MVP didn’t get enough traction and the service was shut down before spending a fortune on building an expensive platform.

How to assemble your first WordPress MVP website (Lego style)

One of the things that make WordPress a powerful software is, without any doubts, plugins. You can find a WordPress plugin for pretty much anything business-related. Therefore, it’s quite easy to start by combining one another and try to get you most of the features you need.

These are mature solutions, well tested and, sometimes, even with support. If you had to start today building your WordPress MVP, here’s a list of some well-known products:

• For an eCommerce website, there is WooCommerce, EasyDigitalDownloads and many other solutions
• For a Membership website, we have MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, S2Member, WooCommerce Memberships
• For a Learning Management System, we have LearnDash, WooCommerce Sensei
• For a Community-based website, we have BuddyPress
• For a Subscription-based website we have WooCommerce Subscriptions, plus some Membership plugins too might also serve you well
• For a Job Board website, we have wpjobmanager.com
• For a Marketplace website we have Dokan, WooCommerce Product Vendors, EasyDigitalDownloads Frontend Submissions

The list could go on with thousands of other WordPress plugins.

Remember the Lego style I quickly mentioned in the heading? Well, using a combination of the above plugins, along with others you might need, borrows the idea from playing with the Danish toy bricks. In fact, by assembling, switching, and setting up together different “pieces” you can get 80% of what you need in less than 20% of the time and budget usually required to build a comparable solution from scratch.

The process is similar to what my 2 kids do with their Legos. They take parts off from 3 different sets like, for example, one Lego kit to build a police station, one for a fire rescue vehicle and one for a submarine. Then, with all these parts they try to build something completely new, like a starship 🙂 For them, that will work, and most importantly, it will be good enough to have fun. Same goes for you as this approach will be good enough to get some traction.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows here. Actually, there’s a huge caveat you should be aware of. Although the Lego bricks are of the same quality, unfortunately not all the WordPress plugins are created equal: some of them are very good, others are just fine, but there are also some others that, well, are just plain crap.

[bctt tweet=”Not all plugins are created equal: some are very good, others are fine, some others are plain crap”]

To overcome this limitation, you can read some reviews and comments around the internet. But, if you ask me, a more thorough approach would involve hiring a WordPress expert for assessing the WordPress plugins’ code you’d chosen before moving on to something serious.

How to extend your MVP website in a smart way using custom developed features

After you’ve successfully built your (lovely) MVP website, which probably solves 80% of your business requirements, there will come a time when you’ll want to move your website even further and add the missing 20% of the features.

Now that you have a working MVP website, and you have some real traffic data from live users, you certainly know more about what has to be built. You could just go ahead, hire a WordPress developer and add all the features from your list. Or you might want to approach this in an Agile manner, that is, to build the next layer of the most valuable features to gather new feedback from your user base.

For this, you’ll need a WordPress team with a consultative approach, who will guide you throughout the process, help you take the best decisions based on your business goals and, ultimately, build it for you. Further on, I’ll describe the Agile process that we’ve used with great success, but before that, let me familiarize you with the Agile terminology.

User Story

A User Story is a thin-sliced feature describing what has to be achieved, usually following this format: As a [user role], I want to [goal/desire] so that [benefit].

Here’s an example for an eCommerce website: As a Customer, I want to push the “Add to favorites” button on the Product page so that I can save this product for later reviewing or buying.

Another example is: As a Customer, I want to see on the Product page a tab named “Technical Specifications” which will contain a simple text so that I can read all the technical details of this product. Once implemented, a user story will add a fully functional feature despite its small size. More info on user stories here.

Product Backlog

The Product Backlog is a list of all the features (User Stories) you will ever want to build in your website. You don’t have to build all the features in the Product Backlog, however, you might want to have a complete inventory at hand when choosing the one we will be developing.

Sprint

A Sprint is a batch of development hours (eg: 20, 40 or 50 hours) with a set of expected User Stories to be delivered.

Sprint Backlog

This is a list of User Stories you chose to work on during this sprint.

Product Owner

The Product Owner is the person that’s part of the development team who has the overall view of the project and who has in mind your business priorities. She/he will be also in charge of the communication between you and the team.

There are other terms in the Agile vocabulary, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll only focus on the ones above.

Now, let’s dive into the development process you should expect for getting the best out of your MVP WordPress website.

The Agile WordPress development process

This is a customized process we put in place for our WordPress projects. This is our agency’s specific approach to building WordPress based MVPs and it is based on Scrum and Kanban, two well-known software development methodologies. By reading the steps depicted below, you’ll have:

• A better understanding of what to expect
• What are the stages involved as well as the deliverables
• Generally speaking, how an Agile-based process works

Here are the steps involved:

1. We do an initial consultation with you, explaining the Agile approach if this is something new to you as well as its advantages and limitations.
2. We take time to understand your business goals. We assess if the project lends itself to an Agile approach. We agree upon the length of the sprints and discuss the overall project budget.
3. We start the sprint by requiring you to make the deposit for the first batch of hours to Codeable escrow.
4. We interview you, we document your requirements as User Stories and compile the Product Backlog. Remember? The Product Backlog is the list of all User Stories (features) you might want to build later on. We keep the Product Backlog in Asana. See the Tools section below for more info.
5. We help you prioritize the development effort by reordering the User Stories in the Product Backlog by their ROI. We do this by labeling every Product Backlog item with Small/Medium/Large and then we ask you to answer the following question for every item in the Product Backlog: “How much money will this feature make you during the next 12 months?” If the ratio between feature size and feature value is low, then this is a low ROI feature and we deprioritize it. If, however, we have a high-value feature per effort, then we move it to the top.
6. Now that we’ve reordered the Product Backlog, we choose the top N features for the next Sprint and we move them to our Sprint Backlog.
7. We plan the sprint in our calendar managed with Harvest Forecast and we mark the deadline for the planned User Stories in Asana. See the Tools section below for more info.
8. We work on creating the features. As the development takes place, we keep detailed time sheet reports using Harvest time tracking tool.
9. We regularly update you via Asana regarding the progress that has been made.
10. You review the delivered features and provide feedback. When you use your website even unfinished, something magic happens and you start gaining very valuable a lot of insights about the way to go further.
11. When the planned features and/or the budgeted hours are finished, the sprint is ended.
12. We meet with you over skype/phone to review what has been done, we collect final feedback for the sprint. We will normally ask you to test the new features with real users if possible.
13. We reorganize together the Product Backlog by eventually adding any new User Stories.
14. We start a new sprint by continuing with point #3. We repeat this until your business goals have been attained at a sufficient level and/or the allocated budget has been consumed.

Tools for Agile WordPress Development

As promised, here are the tools we are using for the above-mentioned Agile WordPress development process.

• Asana for storing the Product Backlog, for managing the Sprint Backlogs for every sprint and for communication with you. Hence, we’ll need you to regularly login to Asana and reply to our comments. Alternatively, we can use Trello or a similar tool if you have a specific preference.
• Harvest for time tracking and reporting the time spent on the work. This is a tool we are using internally.
• Harvest Forecast for planning the workload and calculating the deadlines. This is a tool we are using internally.

I shared the above tools just as a reference. You, as a potential client, will only be using Asana.

Top 6 benefits of the Agile WordPress development approach

Not all the projects lend themselves to an Agile approach and not all the clients are ready to embrace such an approach. Agile will require a lot of communication and feedback between you, as a customer and your development team. In case you are willing to give it a go, these are some of the benefits that we’ve noticed while working on Agile powered projects:

1. You focus like a laser beam on the top features and leave aside all the other nice to have features.
2. You have full control over the development process through Asana task management and timesheet reports.
3. You get the sense of how it is to work with your WordPress team quite quickly so you keep the risks under control. If you don’t get anything valuable after one or two sprints, you might want to consider changing the team you are working with.
4. Better prioritization – you gain visibility over what has to be done based on a working variant of your website, you do usability testing rather than guessing what will actually work.
5. Budget control – you can stop the project after any sprint shall you decide to do that. You will still get a functional website even though it might not contain all the features.
6. You will maximize the business value you are getting out of your invested money because you are only choosing the features with top ROI for your website.

Wrapping things up

WordPress acts as a powerful tool when it comes to quickly building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your future website project. In the WordPress ecosystem, you can find pretty much anything you need whether in the form of a theme or a plugin. Beware though, not all plugins feature the same level of quality as the best ones. That’s why, if you really want to use them for your MVP, I’d advise you to have a WordPress expert to review their code.

When you power WordPress up with an Agile development approach, you’ll gain early visibility over your website, plus a chance to test what actually works rather than just wandering in the dark trying to understand what might work. This early valuable feedback will help you better prioritize and get the most out of your given budget, which will translate into a higher ROI for you.

And who doesn’t want that when it comes to business?

The post Agile WordPress Development: How To Maximize The ROI Of Your MVP Website appeared first on Codeable.