David Emery Online

Control freakery

20 March 2007

I’ve noticed an increasing trend at work, and I wonder if my experience tallies with everyone else’s.

We are taking on more and more projects in-house, up to the point where doing something out of house is very much something out of the ordinary. This is the complete reverse of the situation a year ago, where more projects (and I’m specifically referring to web projects) were done by freelancers then full time members of staff.

Quite admittedly we’ve taken on more staff since then – and get another in a few weeks – but the tide had changed way before they* came along.

I think one of the main – if not the main – reasons is that we ended up realising that for a lot of things, we could do them in house with the same amount of effort as managing an external contractor. We turn stuff around so ridiculously quickly – probably at least 1 reasonably complicated site a week, coupled with half a dozen or so one or two pages mini-sites and a host of site updating – that we start to hit problems that simply can’t be avoided when using external people, like the amount of time it takes to round-trip design ideas or the difficulty of quickly transferring large files.

The other major factor I guess, which directly ties in, is a fairly healthy dose of control freakery; which does, of course, come with a rather large side order of arrogance. It’s not to say that external people can’t do good work – far from it. But, trying to explain the need to move something 2 pixels higher up the page, or getting across quite how important the back-end interface to a custom CMS is (“Yes, you should follow our HTML and CSS guidelines there, too”) can be extremely time consuming.

This is not to say, though, that we suffer from “not invented here” syndrome – far from it, I hope. We use a huge amount of external code day in, day out; it’s the only way we’d manage to whip though the work load that we do. Open Source Software like Textpattern, PhpList and more are daily staples in what we do, and we’d be slightly lost without them.

However, for some projects we’re now running up against the limits of what is available in the Open Source world, which leads us to a slight dilemma – do we forge on, developing larger projects in house, or do we bite the bullet and spend (quite a lot of) money on an externally built solution? We’re slowly but surely veering towards the former, where the latter is what we’ve traditionally always done.

I’ll be honest, I’m a little worried (in a good way, though).

Some of the projects we’ve got lined up are really quite complicated, but there simply aren’t any solutions to them (good or otherwise) on the market at the moment.

Actually, scratch that – I think I might just be excited, not worried.

Maybe a bit of both.

So, is it just me? How are you balancing working with external contractors vs doing it yourself and utilising the assorted rapid development tools and OSS that are about?