Building vs Buying an Engineering Management Platform

The inherent value in adopting an engineering management platform (EMP) is clear. Delivering insights into where effort is being spent within the engineering organization empowers data-driven decision-making that can fundamentally improve the workflows of the engineering teams, attract top talent to a contemporary organization, and create shared understanding of goals and deliverables across business units.

However, there is often the question of building a custom tool in-house versus buying an “off-the-shelf” EMP. This decision is not one to be taken lightly, as there are many financial factors, both tangible and intangible, that need to be considered when making the investment in an EMP.

This whitepaper introduces broad phases of tool development to aid in categorizing and quantifying the effort needed to build a tool as well as add-on costs associated with manual effort:

• 1: Vision and architecture of the project
• 2: Building the tool
• 3: Maintaining and troubleshooting
• 4: Capturing opportunity cost of manual reporting and cost capitalization