Why is developing your own staffing tool a false good idea?
Estelle
Content manager
January 21, 2021
4 min
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When it becomes necessary to invest in a new staffing software - because the Excel files used until now are no longer robust enough - it is normal to wonder if it is not more economical and faster to develop your own tool rather than using a market solution to ensure its quality and its adequacy to your needs. A legitimate question, but reality shows that it is very often preferable to invest in a dedicated external solution. We explain to you here wherefore.
Developing a tool “from scratch” requires a dedicated project team (a product manager, a UX/UI, developers...). Therefore, a choice is required: completely outsource the construction of the tool or internalize it (in case your company has the necessary resources, generally service companies).
Here are the costs that the development of staffing software could represent if we consider the following (very optimistic) assumptions:
🛠 the construction of the staffing solution mobilizes a project team of 5 people with complementary profiles ;
📅 the project team is mobilized on One year full time, which represents 1,100 working days considering that each person works 220 days per year on average.
The provider will charge you a TJM (Average Daily Rate) of around €600 excluding VAT per person, a low range of prices offered by service companies specializing in the IT field. The 1,100 days of work would therefore represent a budget of €660,000 excluding VAT. (1,100 x 600€ excluding VAT).
If you choose to assign employees internally to the project, the €660k excluding VAT that you expect to save by doing without external service providers actually represents a significant loss of turnover. Indeed, your employees will work full time on the development of the tool and not on customer projects, projects on which you could have invoiced them.
The real cost of the project depends on the CJM (Average Daily Cost) of the collaborators in question. The market shows that The average CJM in service companies is 300€.
Ps: to calculate a CJM, simply divide the average annual paid salary of an employee by 220 (the number of working days worked per year on average).
If we go back to the previous hypotheses, the cost of internal development amounts to €330,000 (1,100 x 300€).
Since the time devoted to building the solution “is” expensive, the project team will have to get to the point: meet the specifications according to current needs nothing more and nothing less, without taking the time to anticipate future changes in company processes. The risk is therefore to have to manage, in retrospect, a significant quantity of unforeseen events (new needs, new rights management, new tools to connect to, etc.) that will interfere with the V1 of the staffing software.
Ps: in addition to the strict technical development of the solution, the time spent on the onboarding of all employees to ensure the correct adoption of the tool. The efficiency of a staffing software depends on how it is used and the data entered into it, so the onboarding phase is critical. For a company with 100 employees, the person in charge of onboarding will have to count on average 1 day per week dedicated to the subject over a period of 6 months, a period that can be longer or shorter depending on the number of people involved in the Staffing process.
Managing bugs (which are inherent in any IT project) represents a significant amount of time invested in maintaining the tool rather than on customer projects. On average, it will be necessary to devote half a day per week to maintaining the staffing software. This represents 26 days of work per year or €7,8k (26 x 300€) additional per year if we use the same assumptions as before. Another cost that is far from being trivial but often forgotten: if the employees who developed the solution leave your company, the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain the software would leave with them, you would then have to devote a lot of time and energy to training new people on the subject.
Like your business and your processes, your tool will have to evolve. You are going to need to create new features that you would not have thought of during its initial development. The creation of these new functionalities and their integration into the staffing software will once again require the mobilization of the project team, and will make you experience the same biases as during the first development.
If you add new tools to your computer systems, this will lead to new changes since you will have to connect the staffing tool to them. So many interfaces that have not been thought out from the start and that will be time-consuming - an average of 10 days of work for a standard interface.
In this case, each of the changes you want to make to The staffing tool will be the subject of a new mobilization, and therefore additional costs. Moreover, these changes are not instantaneous, they will extend the time during which you will have difficulty using your solution with the risk of potentially degrading your staffing rate and therefore your turnover.
While we have seen that developing, maintaining and developing your own staffing tool is expensive, we must also consider the following points:
📃 legal : your DPO must follow the subject closely from a RGPD/security point of view since personal data will necessarily be stored in the staffing tool.
🧑 user experience : the interface must be sufficiently UX friendly to ensure the perfect adoption of your tool by all employees and to ensure the efficiency of the staffing process. Too often, the tools developed neglect this aspect to shorten development time and fall by the wayside because they are not used. The investment in the project is therefore totally lost.
❌ risk of errors : a poor appreciation of all the small subtleties to be integrated as parameters in the staffing tool can cause heavy losses of activity and/or distort your analyses. One expert staffing solution will allow you to integrate all these particular cases without risk.
Save time (and money) by learning how Napta can meet your specific staffing needs.
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