Software
Bibek Neupane6 min read
How to judge an IT company before you hire one
Eight questions that separate a company that will finish your project from one that will go quiet in month three.
Bibek Neupane6 min read
Everyone claims the same things, so claims are useless as a filter. Questions are not. These are the ones whose answers actually predict how the project will go.
The eight questions
- 1Will I be talking to the people who write the code, or to an account manager?
- 2What exactly is in scope, and what is explicitly out?
- 3Who owns the code, the domain, and the hosting accounts when we finish?
- 4What happens to the timeline if something slips, and is that written down?
- 5What does a change request cost, and how is it agreed?
- 6Is SEO structure part of the build or billed separately?
- 7What does support cost after launch, and what response time comes with it?
- 8Can I speak to a client you delivered for over a year ago?
The last one is the most revealing. Anybody can produce a happy client from last month. A client from two years ago tells you whether the work held up and whether the company stayed reachable.
Warning signs
- A quotation with no exclusions listed.
- A promise of first page rankings on a timeline.
- Reluctance to put the timeline in the agreement.
- No written change process.
Ask what happens when we disagree. A company that has thought about that has been through it and learned something. One that has not is telling you it has not delivered much.
We wrote a longer version of this as a buying guide: how to choose the best IT company in Nepal.
hiringvendor selectionscope
Written by
Bibek Neupane
Operations Incharge for Europe
Bibek looks after client operations and delivery, and writes about scoping work so both sides know what they agreed to.
More about Bibek
