Introduction
What comes to your mind when you hear the word "outsourcing? How not to fail with outsourcing?" To figure out outsourcing advantages and disadvantages you have to be honest.
If you had asked us this question few years ago, we probably would have said “An attempt of a foreign country to get cheaper labor at the customer’s detriment. Is there a way to fail in that?” Outsourcing is the latest buzzword nowadays, more and more quality conscious and cost businesses all over the world are turning to Eastern countries for outsourcing their business processes.
Outsourcing has become a major tendency in human resources over the past decade. It's the process of sending certain job functions outside a company instead of handling them in house – a “do it for me” option, meaning that your company’s function or issue is entirely outsourced to another company. An increasing number of companies, large and small, are turning to outsourcing as a way to grow and develop while keeping down the payroll and overhead costs. In fact, the advantages and disadvantages of global outsourcing have not been distinguished clearly yet.
What is outsourcing exactly and what are the benefits of having an offshore or nearshore partner that gets your things done? For instance, imagine you walking into a store and asking to have somebody make you a suit and you agreeing on a price of $200, a week after that you’d expect to walk back into that same store and be trying on your new suit after parting with a $200 bill, wouldn’t you? And now, imagine you walking into a store across the street, what if the shop assistant offered to make a suit for you for $75? You’d think, “Awesome, this is even less than half of what I have been offered before! I’ll take it instead”. In a week’s time you have a perfectly made suit ready for you. – Got the point? - But this is only one of the benefits of outsourcing. You can find a lot of such outsourcing examples of the companies offering cost reduction.
Foreign companies outsource mainly to cut costs. But nowadays, outsourcing is not only about cutting cost but also about reaping the advantages of strategic outsourcing such as reducing turnaround time, accessing skilled expertise, flexible staffing, increasing efficiency and eventually multiplying the profit. The other important issue that companies and small business face these days is that most of the highly skilled specialists already cooperate with such IT giants as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc., if you are none of the above mentioned, there’s a very low risk that you might actually find somebody skillful to work for you. The situation will hardly give you a chance to fail outsourcing in this case.
Of course nowadays there is a lot of very cheap and inexpensive offers for outsourcing. Nevertheless, cheap is not always a good way to solve your problems. Today the market offers us a bunch of unqualified inexperienced workforce, this means that your outsource projects may be copied and sold again to your rivals or in some cases a cut-price is a lack of experience or knowledge. For instance, you get dumped in the middle of the project just because the outsourcing company has suddenly realized they have no idea how to handle your project as it is too challenging for them. Numerous fail outsourcing examples are available on the Internet actually.
Also, one of the other big challenges of paying extra cheap is not being able to communicate because of the time difference- with about a 12 hour difference with MST (Mountain Standard Time) it is very difficult to find moments to speak; this of course leads to a poor communication, which may result in bad performance. Yet, outsourcing can fail where it is expected to succeed that comprises one of IT outsourcing risks.
Related: Setting up and managing a mobile project at Ind
1. How not to fail with outsourcing?
1.1 “The communication issue in outsourcing”
Communication is crucial to achieve success in your outsourcing venture. One of the fears of many CEOs is that their communication will be limited by their development team’s ability to speak their language which is English mostly. Not only all of the Indeema team members have good English skills, but also we take great care to make sure we develop this feature, for this reason Indeema provides English speaking courses, we have English speaking days and on top of that we run all of our documentation in English, just to make sure everything is clean and clear to clients. Such a practice benefits a lot as IT outsourcing statistics proves.
1.2 “Be interested in your client”
It’s something that needs to be emphasized over and over again because the failure to maintain an open communication is the reason why many clients and their service providers end up in an unhappy situation.
Indeema team understands that a successful customer is going to stay with us for a longer period of time, which can bring more profit to both parties. This is one of the reasons Indeema establishes close relationships with its clients, which includes more communication and working on approaching our client’s goals.
1.3 “Ideas and code theft”
When hiring a programmer or a team of programmers to materialize your business idea, please keep in mind that there is a serious risk of theft. This happens a lot — and everywhere. The subject affects IT outsourcing pros and cons significantly.
Indeema always signs an NDA, which helps to protect the entrepreneurs ideas from being stolen. All of the Indeema team members carry the responsibility of not sharing the idea with anyone else for a specific period of time. All of the code is stored on the secured servers and is never used in for any other goals.
1.4 ”Respect your project deadlines”
“Hey - sorry it took me so long to develop this project, I did my best. I had a super crazy week and been just so busy with all my other tasks. But better late than never, right?” – is something you would never hear from the Indeema team.
Conclusion
Very often outsource companies take all of the projects they can and lower their prices but later miss the deadline. As our culture is built of the success of our clients, Indeema counts all of the potential project risks and provides our clients with the realistic dates and prices. Indeema would rather not accept the project, than understate the price, but at the end miss the deadline.
Related: 9 tips to prevent a horrifying contract with your IT partner in Ukraine
The essential key to the successful outsourcing is in avoiding all of the above mentioned features. If done in the correct way, outsourcing can be a one of the most significant components of a company’s development.
