[LRUG] London RoR consultancies/agencies

[Luis Correa d'Almeida]

Well, it really depends on your end goal.

A consultancy should give you flexibility, established approach and
competence out of the box, at a price. If you are using consultants
that have been with the firm for a while, then they've been filtered
on quality, coached, aligned with a set of practices, and you know
you'll get good people - if you don't you can ask them to be replaced.
You should also be able to ramp up on short notice, but you should ask
how easy that will be and manage that expectation if that's what
you're looking for down the line. It also gives you a different reach,
as you can leverage other parts of their business fairly easily. For
example, if you need someone to come in and spend a couple of days
thinking through your QA process, they'll have someone that's thinking
about that all the time. For some, the fact that you are not bringing
in permanent people means you can allocate these costs to services
rather than salaries. This is important for companies that set a
ceiling on the increase of salary expenditure year on year.

On the other hand, you need to realize you are not building a resident
team - consultants like to experience different projects so they'll
rotate, say, every 12 months max. One solution is to hire throughout
the engagement and have the consultants pair with the new hires.

Another thing to consider is that they may or may not have the domain
expertise you require. Not to say that hiring means you'll get someone
with experience in your domain, but you can look at that. On the other
hand, some consultancies will be stronger in some domains that others.
Look at their client portfolio.

It also really depends on how you manage the engagement. It is very
different to through a project over the wall and expect them to
deliver, versus managing the engagement yourself.

Guess we could go on and on and on. One final note. Price and cost are
two different things.




On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Louis Beardsley
<Louis.Beardsley at explorerec.com> wrote:
> What are you guises thoughts on the pros & cons of using an agency/consultancy vs using freelancers/contractors for small to medium sized Ruby projects?
>
> Louis Beardsley
>
> http://uk.linkedin.com/in/louisbeardsley
> http://about.me/louis.beardsley
> @LouisRoR
> Skype: LouisGB1
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On Behalf Of Luis Correa d'Almeida
> Sent: 30 April 2012 13:40
> To: London Ruby Users Group
> Subject: Re: [LRUG] London RoR consultancies/agencies
>
> I've hired ThoughtWorks for both C# and Ruby projects, as well as agile enablement (if you will). Very good, but expensive.
>
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Dan Singerman <dansingerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi LRUGers
>>
>> I hope this request is not too bothersome.
>>
>> I'm looking to compile a list of mid-to-large size
>> agencies/consultancies anyone would recommend for Ruby on Rails projects.
>>
>> If you have worked with one you'd recommend, work for one you'd
>> recommend, or know one where great people work, I'd love it if you could let me know.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Dan
>>
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