You found a great vendor. You came up with a great plan and executed on it effectively, maybe even staying on budget. You paid the agency hundreds of thousands of dollars and now you’ve got a high-end custom Ruby on Rails software application. It is just days away from launch and then you realize that there might be some work needed post-launch, or maybe there might always be some work needed here or there, but when you talk to the vendor they inform you that they don’t do maintenance work and–gasp–they aren’t “set up” for 24/7 support.
Surprisingly, your very trusted software development vendor doesn’t want to work with you any longer... sure it’s less money than the original project but isn’t this easy for them?
Why wouldn’t they see this as a win, they don’t have to invest in selling a new client, you’re just handing them a budget with a predictable relationship? On the surface it certainly seems they are the best partner for the job, given that they know the code base, they who wrote it after all, and they just spent the last six+ months working with you to create your new baby!
If this is your first time that you have had to experience this–sorry! It’s not unusual and in fact is the more common practice of many software development vendors. How come?
Why aren’t vendors that build custom software also setup to help maintain and support that software?
For one thing, what you may need is around the clock support but vendors may not have a single employee on their roster who wants to sign up for that. Everyone likes the fun, headline grabbing, innovative work–as long as it doesn’t impede on their personal or social lives.
Here’s three other reasons your vendor may not be jumping to provide you support and maintenance.
1. Employee retention
Vendors have a hard time keeping engineering talent. There is pressure from well-funded startups and companies that compete with those startups, effectively driving up demand and consequently salary levels for employees. Vendors are at an inherent disadvantage as they scale primarily based on headcount and billable hours, compared to a company with a software platform that can scale infinitely… bigger margins translate into less price sensitivity in recruiting and retaining the people to do the work. When an engineer at a vendor peers across the aisle they can jump ship to go work on “the client side” or for a startup and make 150% to 200%+ more than they were previously, plus potential of equity and an exit. To combat this problem vendors may look to create compelling and fulfilling cultures, “it’s like a family”, or more often than not work to present a stream of interesting work that helps keep an engineer engaged in the work, learning, advancing their skill set and resume, so they can later spread their wings. Meanwhile, support and maintenance projects tend to be the ugly stepchild of a vendor that no engineers want to work on and forcing them to do so risks increased churn and costs for hiring.
2. Resource Planning
Vendors that are effective at building new software platforms often require a diverse set of specialties to deliver the level of quality product you demand. This includes everyone from project management to user research and design, to visual design, front end development and backend development. Plus maybe copywriting, analytics, branding strategists and so forth. Keeping a collection of diverse specialists busy means finding client projects that fit a certain profile and can benefit from the skill set and service delivery. Most often this means big budget projects that span many months, like building a platform, product, or tool from scratch, that requires all the different departments to get involved. This kind of project can be put on a schedule, planned out, and balanced with other projects that have similar staffing needs. Teams can be formed around projects or entire brands, where each specialist is adding value, collaborating with other specialists, racking up billable hours and peeling off your project just as the next large one is starting. This doesn’t balance with the needs of support and maintenance. A support and maintenance request can often be both triaged and completed by a single individual. It may be significant hours out of that one person’s schedule, but doesn’t demand a full multi-disciplinary team, which then can throw staffing totally off-balance. When the support engineer gets tied up, delays cascade both upstream and downstream blocking other team members whose work is dependant on the engineer, keeping sales from booking new work on the schedule. While vendors tend to have extra bench time due to pockets of bandwidth, these utilization gaps are notoriously hard to predict and take advantage of to serve clients. Vendors are simply not set up to staff this kind of work.
3. New Business Portfolio
Vendors live and die by that work that they do. An innovative project that makes the cut for case studies and can be highlighted in their portfolio can lead to years of new clients and work. It helps attract talent. It can result in building out entirely new lines of business for a vendor. Innovative work requires taking risks and chasing the big sexy projects, sometimes losing money “investing in the future”, and certainly not small support and maintenance tasks. Even when the cumulative budget for a support and maintenance engagement is significant, there is little chance that the outcome might be award-winning or help a vendor make a name for themselves, get national press, or drive new leads. While it might be building your business and adding value to your customers, it’s not something that can be paraded around by the vendor as a way to win new work and talent.
So. Your vendor may be “firing” you, but it could be one of those cases of “it’s not you, it’s me us”. They don’t have anything against you, it’s just not all vendors are set up to provide support and maintenance for your Ruby on Rails application. Breakwater is. Contact Us to find out how.