Partnering with a development agency can be an excellent way to bring your digital product to life, access specialized expertise, and scale your development capacity. However, successful agency partnerships require understanding what to expect, how to communicate effectively, and how to set projects up for success. This guide covers what you need to know when working with development partners.
Understanding Agency Models
Development agencies operate with different models that affect how projects are structured and billed. Understanding these models helps you choose partners aligned with your needs and budget approach.
Fixed Price Projects
Fixed price engagements define scope, deliverables, and cost upfront. You know exactly what you will pay for a defined set of features. This model works well when requirements are clear and unlikely to change significantly. The risk of scope creep falls on the agency, creating incentive for thorough upfront requirements gathering.
The downside is reduced flexibility. Changes to requirements after project kickoff typically require change orders with additional costs. Fixed price also tends toward conservative scope definition, as agencies protect against underestimation.
Time and Materials
Time and materials engagements bill for actual hours worked, typically at agreed hourly or daily rates. This model provides flexibility to adjust scope as the project evolves and learnings emerge. You pay for what you use, and priorities can shift based on feedback and changing needs.
The tradeoff is less budget predictability. Without fixed scope, costs can exceed initial estimates. This model requires active involvement to manage priorities and ensure hours are spent on the most valuable work.
Retainer Arrangements
Retainer models reserve a fixed amount of agency capacity for a monthly fee. This works well for ongoing development needs where work is continuous rather than project-based. Retainers provide predictable costs and guaranteed availability.
The Discovery and Planning Phase
Quality agencies invest time understanding your business, users, and objectives before writing code. This discovery phase might include stakeholder interviews to understand business goals, user research to identify needs and pain points, competitive analysis to understand the market landscape, technical assessment of existing systems and constraints, and requirements documentation capturing what needs to be built.
While this phase might feel like delayed progress, thorough discovery prevents costly mistakes and rework later. Agencies that skip this phase often encounter problems that careful planning would have prevented.
Communication and Collaboration
Establishing Communication Patterns
Successful projects require clear communication channels and expectations. Discuss preferred tools for communication, whether email, Slack, project management systems, or video calls. Establish meeting cadences for status updates, demos, and decision-making. Define escalation paths for urgent issues.
Regular touchpoints keep projects on track and surface issues before they become problems. Most agencies recommend at least weekly status meetings, with more frequent communication during intensive phases.
Your Role in the Partnership
Agency partnerships are collaborative. While agencies bring technical expertise, you bring business knowledge, user insights, and decision-making authority. Be prepared to participate actively through providing feedback on designs and prototypes promptly, answering questions and clarifying requirements, making decisions when options are presented, testing deliverables and reporting issues, and championing the project within your organization.
Delayed feedback and decisions are among the most common causes of project delays. Treating your agency as a partner rather than a vendor improves outcomes for everyone.
Managing Expectations Around Timelines
Software development timelines are notoriously difficult to estimate accurately. Complexity hides in details that only emerge during implementation. Requirements evolve as stakeholders see working software. Technical challenges arise that were not anticipated during planning.
Good agencies provide realistic estimates with appropriate ranges, communicate proactively when timelines are at risk, adjust scope or resources to meet critical deadlines, and document assumptions underlying estimates.
Build buffer into your planning for the unexpected. If an agency estimates eight weeks, plan internally for ten. This buffer absorbs normal variability without creating crisis.
Quality Assurance and Testing
Understanding how agencies approach quality assurance helps you evaluate deliverables appropriately. Professional agencies include testing in their process, covering unit tests to verify individual components, integration tests to ensure components work together, user acceptance testing to validate requirements are met, performance testing for applications with significant load, and security testing for applications handling sensitive data.
Discuss testing approaches during agency selection. Understand what testing is included and what falls to you. Your organization should plan for user acceptance testing regardless of agency testing practices.
Handling Changes and Scope Creep
Requirements change. Markets shift, users provide feedback, stakeholders have new ideas. How changes are handled significantly impacts project success and budget.
Establish change management processes early. Understand how changes are evaluated, how impact is assessed, and how decisions are made about incorporating changes. For fixed price projects, this typically involves formal change requests with cost implications. For time and materials, changes are more fluid but still require prioritization decisions.
Some scope change is normal and healthy. Excessive change indicates inadequate initial planning or unrealistic expectations about locking requirements. If you find yourself constantly changing direction, step back and address underlying clarity issues.
Delivery and Launch
Professional agencies plan for successful delivery, not just code completion. This includes deployment to production environments, data migration if replacing existing systems, training for users and administrators, documentation for ongoing maintenance, and transition planning for post-launch support.
Discuss launch planning early. Understand what is included in the engagement and what requires additional planning. Rushed launches create problems; adequate preparation ensures smooth transitions.
Building Long-Term Relationships
The best agency relationships extend beyond single projects. Agencies that understand your business, users, and systems provide increasing value over time. They require less onboarding for new initiatives and can proactively suggest improvements based on accumulated knowledge.
Invest in relationships with agencies that deliver well. Provide feedback, celebrate successes together, and work through challenges constructively. Long-term partnerships benefit both parties and improve outcomes for future projects.
