Make the relationship with your agency partner, rock!

**Moving digital capabilities in-house requires learning how to get in sync.**

No organisation can do everything by itself. No matter how large or well-managed a business is, the need for healthy partnerships and third-party service contracts remains a constant. 

This is especially true among software developers and creative service firms, where technical expertise and industry-specific experience offer transformative value. Many business leaders choose to build their businesses on outsourced creative capabilities, then gradually move their capabilities in-house over time.

Why Businesses Move Creative Disciplines In-House

As a company gets bigger, moving creative processes to digital skills in-house teams makes sense. There are three main motivators that drive this movement:

• Risk Management. Many leaders believe that owning digital delivery mitigates the risks of software development by enabling closer management.
• Budget Pressures. There is always mounting pressure to do more with less. This is especially true among growing businesses that must prioritise expenditures wisely.
• Transparency. Consulting firm clients do not always get to see into every aspect of the agency’s development efforts. Keeping strategy, design & creative thinkers in-house helps improve that kind of visibility.

These three issues are the reason why organisations are taking creative services in-house. This is not just true for software development, but also for content creation, social media management, data analytics, and more.

This approach can lead to a few quick wins. In-house processes have a lower raw cost base and allow for closer control of intellectual property, as well as tighter management. However, there are still challenges that many businesses fail to acknowledge.

Challenges to Building an In-House Team

Building a long-term, sustainable digital team is an incredibly difficult task. Hiring a developer can cost more than $20,000 in management time, recruiting fees, and other external costs. If an employee turns out not to be a good fit, all the time and money spent hiring that employee simply vanishes.

Many factors can impact the decision to develop internal digital capabilities. Some of the major ones associated with building digital skills in-house teams include:

Digital Production is More Than Just Writing Code

Many managers make the mistake of thinking that developing digital capability is an exclusively technical task. It is much more than that. 

Hiring someone who knows how to code software does not guarantee that the software will work, let alone meet its objectives or purpose. A development team needs to include people with complementary skills and experiences that predict successful outcomes for the task at hand.

Great digital teams have tech-minded strategists, focused user experience designers, and innovative creative developers. The collective synergy that makes a great team goes far beyond the individual technical skills each team member may bring to the table.

  “It’s like putting a band together – anyone can throw a guitarist, a drummer and a bass player in a room but the chances of them becoming the Stones, Nirvana or Queen is pretty slim. 

Multidisciplinary Teams Have Vastly Different Outlooks and Learning Styles

Another common problem stems from a misunderstanding about what it means to be “digital”. Many managers oversimplify the roles and mindsets that digitally experienced people bring to the table. Where some people are creative thinkers, others are leaders, doers, strategists, or advocates. There is a wide spectrum of outlooks and learning styles available to the digitally-minded manager, and the best teams productively combine multiple, different elements.

In fact, Walter Burke Barbe and Neil Fleming’s research on Visual, Kinaesthetic and Auditory learning types shows that there is a significant disconnect between the general population and those who operate in digital strategy and production environments. While 85% of the general population learn and communicate in a primarily auditory way, 80% of individuals working on digital teams rely on visual and kinaesthetic cues more.

Unless you take time to truly understand how these different types of people interact with one another in the complex realm of digital production, you won’t be able to reap the benefits of running an in-house team. Early digital solution providers discovered this in the early 2000s and have been honing their ability to orchestrate these types of people ever since.

Continually Driving and Motivating a Team is No Small Feat

The kinaesthetic and visual learners who you are likely to find working in digital agencies are motivated by different things. In his seminal book Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Performance, Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that people with visual and kinaesthetic learning styles tend to be driven by intrinsic motivations.

This means that giving these types of people a variety of work, a plethora of opportunities to improve, and highly stimulating problem-solving activities will produce better results than giving them the same job to do, day after day. 

Many of these people value the challenge of the agency environment more than they value the money or benefits they could get working for a company developing a single product in a single market.

Keeping Up With Dynamic Trends in Technology

Technology trends represent the last obstacle between building digital skills in-house teams and making those teams work in the long run. Agency developers work in an exposed environment. They must constantly interact with new and innovative technologies across many industry sectors. Many developers and digital creatives believe that working for a single company will cause their skills to stagnate over time.

How Companies Can Overcome These Obstacles

While the challenges mentioned above are serious, there is no reason to give up on the idea of empowering companies to build their own digital capabilities. We only have to identify the best path forward for addressing each of the issues raised:

Run and Organise Multidisciplinary Teams

Digital problems are complex, and many of them require a multidisciplinary approach. In a recent engagement, we were working with a leading national healthcare provider on a project with a 12-person project team and a client/agency ratio of 1:2 – gone are the days of “single point of contact.”

Every single contributor to that project engaged with it on a daily basis, working without boundaries or titles. On top of this, four spokespeople supported the team by fuelling and extracting them back into their respective, equally diverse groups to inform and implement tasks. This level of engagement demands clear communication and excellent organisation, as well as great interpersonal skills.

Share DevOps Practices and Integrate Them

Your integration goals should go further than human talent. In order to succeed with technically complex problems, your digital tools must also benefit from a deep level of integration. Teams that share processes, practices, and toolsets will communicate better, get jobs done more efficiently, and be better-suited to resolving unexpected obstacles and hang-ups.

Insource Your Digital Squad

Over the last 18 months, our agency has helped multiple businesses build insourced digital production teams. These “digital squads” are specialists working within the client’s business, either on-site or cycling back through the agency, offering total immersion and quick-response utility without requiring the organisation to go through a lengthy and risky hiring process. 

Give and Expect Full Transparency From Your Agency Partner

Lastly, and most importantly, both agencies and their clients need to leverage the power of transparency to build great partnerships. As with any relationship, the foundation of trust is critical to delivering successful results.

The best way to establish a foundation of trust is to be open and honest, showing every piece of work and calculation while taking time to explain the complexities and potential pitfalls of the solution.

In order for transparency to work, each side must strive to deliver a fair exchange and avoid taking advantage of one another. A prosperous agency is a sustainable one, and the talent and resources it provides can transform your business.

Sources:

VAK learning styles: what are they and what do they mean? - AUS

https://devskiller.com/true-cost-of-recruiting-a-developer-infographic

https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202

https://agencyagile.com