5 Common IT Outsourcing Mistakes Companies Make
Here I list 5 Common IT Outsourcing Mistakes Companies Make and some ideas
on how to prevent them. Theoretically, this can be applied on either end
whether you're onshore or offshore. These mistakes commonly result into software projects
not being completed, projects being delayed or employees resigning due to
misunderstanding. The following list doesn’t necessarily follow any order of
importance.
1. Misaligned Expectations
Expectations should be set from the start. The scope of work must be clearly defined
such that would the developers on the offshore team be doing design work, is it
only coding, would it involve testing or all of them? It is also important to
define the corporate hierarchy equivalent of the offshore team members. For
example, if the developer is a mid-level on the offshore end is he also
expected to be a mid-level developer on the onshore end?
Another thing is to properly layout the employee’s career path. What will he
be after he completes a certain project? What will he be after spending 5 years
of loyal service?
2. Treating each team (offshore/onshore) as a Separate Team
Both teams should be treated as an extension of each team. If one team feels like
they're being looked down upon, or another end feels superior over the other
then you have a serious flaw in your system. Why? Because communication happens
when both ends feel safe (I forgot where I picked that line from)
3. Irregular Status Meetings
It is important to have a regular status meeting so that outstanding issues can
be acknowledged and dealt with at the earliest possible time. Some
nationalities have this communication barrier where they tend to keep to
themselves the problems they have instead of asking someone else who might know
something about the problem.
4. Closed Communication Lines
Make use of the technology that we have today. Skype, e-mail, phones,
everything that you could use to bring the message to the other end is
important. This assures visibility on both ends and it is important to know
what is happening on either end. You might also want to invest on knowledge
base tools like Confluence which is a wiki-sort of application and JIRA which
is a bug tracking tool. This encourages collaboration across the entire team
and could somehow minimize the barrier across time zone differences. Encourage
offshore and onshore employees to use not only all the brains that they have,
but also all that they can borrow.
5. Very Limited Access to Infrastructure
Last but not the least is limited access to infrastructure. Yes, you want to
make your servers as secure as possible. But if it keeps people away, far
enough that they could not do their jobs then your servers are not performing
their jobs. You might want to consider stuff like temporary access to log files
that could at least help a developer determine what went wrong in production if
it’s a production issue. If you don’t want the offshore team to have access to
production data, you might want to create a mirror that hosts dummy data that
closely mimics the one in production… Things like that...
If these things are present in your company then they must be
addressed as soon as possible. These are keys to make the outsourcing
model work for both parties.