|  Quite a few (many) businesses are preferring to outsource their development overseas in order to increase their company’s productivity and efficiency, at the same time reducing their operating costs in an increasingly competitive economy. But any outsourcing relationship poses risks. The best approach is to acknowledge the risks and communicate openly about them in order to create a plan to mitigate them. With careful planning and evaluation of vendors, you can enjoy an outsourcing experience.
Many businesses have come up with the most common risks during outsourcing. In order to overcome these risks, one should take a lead in these points:
1: Misunderstanding the Requirements:
In most cases, service providers fall short to meet expectations not because of inferior ability, but because they misunderstood the project requirements and than the managers at other firms start complaining about the poor quality code received by them. In order to reduce this risk, go for the following suggestions, it will help you a lot when outsourcing offshore.
• The vendor project manager should spend time interviewing potential users about the desired features and functionality for the system being built. It's vital that the vendor captures and churns information about the number of users, knowing how quickly operations are to be performed and how users will actually be using the software.
• Examine the requirements of a system, involving the determining of the acceptability, ability to implement and testability of the proposed system.
• There should be broad review of the proposed requirements, with the purpose of identifying any issues or errors related to ambiguities or discrepancies discovered in the requirements.
2: Quality Assurance:
A major risk when outsourcing to an unknown vendor is whether they have ample QA/testing processes in place. The three main reasons that QA isn't done, or is done inadequately, are:
• The service provider lacks its own QA/testing team and assumes the client will complete this in-house.
• The project has a tight deadline, and so QA testing is done rapidly or set aside to give development a priority.
• The vendor doesn't fully understand the system requirements, and so testing doesn't cover them.
In order to lessen this risk, guide a regular peer review inspections, the vendor will be able to ascertain and correct defects quickly in upstream work products. This permits them to better control there costs and prevents schedule delays during the project.
3: Intellectual Property Protection:
Your intellectual property is one of your company's greatest assets, and when outsourcing, it’s very important to take some steps to guard it.
There should be signing of a nondisclosure agreement, a non-compete agreement, and a no solicitation agreement, as well as policies that obstruct the vendor from creating unauthorized copies of your software or technology. One should always urge on clear documentation of all source code created during your project for your software.
4: Differing Internal Processes:
When developing a project, each vendor has processes and methodologies, in which there is an embodiment of unique characteristics. It's vital to evaluate how this differs from your in-house processes and how the two differing approaches can best be "meshed" during a development project.
It's best if a development project is guided by a well-defined, common software development and project management methodology. The best vendors follow industry standards, such as CMMI and ISO 9001 QMS. This common methodology should cover libraries, tools used, version control and quality assurance processes, as well as security metrics for each project.
5: Communication Barriers:
Nearly every significant study of outsourcing risks in the past decade has brought up the grave problem of communication and the risks associated with it.
Communication can be a concern for several reasons, when outsourcing offshore.
• Not all overseas vendors have staffs who are native speakers of English.
• When it's 11 a.m. standard time in New York City, it's 9:30 p.m. in India. This can make it difficult to communicate with overseas vendors, due to time zone differences, unless they have a project manager onshore.
• In the United States, we tend to be of an "ethnocentric" culture, believing that our management and work styles are adopted around the world. In reality, overseas vendors may work in a very different cultural context, which can lead to misunderstandings.
In order to mitigate with this risk, go through these points thoroughly:
• When selecting a vendor for outsourcing, it's very important to evaluate whether the vendor has sufficient place for onshore staff to facilitate project and relationship management. This includes English fluency, and a strong company commitment to bridge cultural differences.
• Nowadays, communication with an overseas development team through phone or teleconference is much easier with technologies such as VoIP or online conferencing, that allow you to call overseas at no or minimal cost.
Open, frequent communication to discover and discuss the risks related project lets you to come up with a plan jointly for addressing potential problems. Constantly monitoring these risks is something that goes a long way toward maintaining a long-term successful outsourcing partnership.
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