Convincing Your Manager: Why a Control Toolkit is Worth the Investment

You’re convinced: buying this control set will save you and your team hours of work, saved opportunity costs, improve your problem solving skills and generally make rainbow unicorns out of everyone. But your director or client looks at the quote and raises an eyebrow. “Is this really worth it?”

Glad you asked. Here’s a handy script for just such an occasion.

(Enter DEVELOPER.)

DEVELOPER

I've looked at the ROI, and considered our situation when it comes to building vs. buying. We should buy the ComponentOne Studio toolkit.

MANAGER

Why does it cost so much?

DEVELOPER

When you factor in the sheer number of controls we’re getting—controls that are reusable, customizable and already tested—$1495 per license per year is a fraction of what it's worth, compared to how much time we’d be investing.

MANAGER

But you only need this feature here. Isn’t buying the entire set overkill?

DEVELOPER

We only need that feature now, but we will need these other features down the road. In fact, we’ve already needed them, but we ended up building them ourselves. Only we had to go back and fix them when [fill in company] released their latest browser. With this control set we’ll just need to update and it’ll be compatible.

MANAGER

Why would it take so long for us to build what they’re offering? I mean, if it’s just this one feature...

DEVELOPER

Well, there’s designing it. Then we also need these customizations, which we’ll have to figure out from scratch. The ComponentOne Studio controls just require a few property settings and it’s all done. And it’s a control we’ll use in multiple applications, so just having a single source that’s ready to be reused would be really great.

MANAGER

Why can’t you just reuse what you’re building now?

DEVELOPER

Building a reusable control that can be dropped into multiple applications, and handle customizations, takes a lot of time. And we still have to build in responsive design and touch support, and that’s all taken care of in the control set. And we’d have to test it extensively, with all the customizations, so it doesn’t cause more problems down the road. We don’t have time to do that now. We just have time to build it for this application, and then we’d have to copy and paste it later and change it.

MANAGER

So just do that.

DEVELOPER

Well, the problem is, copying and pasting doesn’t really work across applications that easily. We’d still have to make sure it works in the page, and rebuild all the customizations. And if we want to use it again, we’d have to do it all over again. And if we discover a bug later, we’ll have to go back into all the different applications and manually update each of them. Buying means that we can download fixes to any control-based bugs. Plus, as soon as we hire someone new, we’ll have to introduce them to all of our existing code. The ComponentOne Studio controls are usable out-of-the-box, so we save a lot of time onboarding.

MANAGER

OK. How much time would it take for you to build a reusable control properly?

DEVELOPER

_(Demo ROI Calculator here.)_ We need about 12 weeks for this small control to be really reusable. And that’s only this one. ComponentOne Studio has all of these other controls, too. And if we’re building a 3D chart it’s going to take more like a year to make it anywhere near reusable. For us to develop this control in 12 weeks, it comes out to over $27,000 for two developers, the QA and the design time. We can get three licenses and renew for six years and still come out on top.

MANAGER

What if you just build the feature now and forget the reusability?

DEVELOPER

For two weeks of development, plus one week of QA, it still costs less than two licenses for one year.

MANAGER

Let’s do it. Buy!

- END SCENE -

If that still doesn’t do it, remind your manager that for every moment you’re spending figuring out a minor feature already available in ComponentOne Studio, that’s one less moment you’re spending on resolving real business application problems. Check out Build vs. Buy: When Should You Build Your Own Control? for more reading.