Codespring has cumulated 23 years of experience in undertaking outsourcing agreements. The reason why some of our contracts are as old as our company is fine-tuning.
Fine-tuning outsourcing is a key concept that governs our delivery model. There are five major elements that must be fine-tuned when setting the foundation of any project:
- Governance – the steering committee of the software development project
- Responsibility – what will each party be accountable for?
- Software Development Process / Model – which will be the best method?
- Team Collaboration – how will provider and customer team work together?
- Human Resources – how will provider and customer set up the team? What roles?
- Infrastructure – what can each party bring to the project’s infrastructure?
Fine-tuning the outsourcing process over the entire software development life cycle has an impact on the overall quality of the final output. Being a human-intense activity, outsourcing software development must be gracefully managed. The quality and performance parameters must be clearly defined and communicated to the teams.
Fine-tuning responsibility: what are the duties, what are the tasks, who holds control over certain processes, who is leading the process and the teams, what are the deliverables? All these questions must be answered at the right time in order to prevent misunderstandings and latencies.
Fine-tuning software development processes/models: what development model to choose, what measurement techniques, what technologies, what quality assessment instruments? These parameters will impact the final result.
Fine-tuning team collaboration: how will the team be linked one to another, through what means, which contact persons, what collaboration model will be set up? Most of these answers will have to be written in the frame agreement and updated accordingly.
Fine-tuning human resources: to what extent will each party be involved in the team formation, how will be the roles distributed, how will the team members be recruited, motivated, controlled and evaluated?
Fine-tuning infrastructure: depending on the system architecture there will be a required infrastructure for the project. Up to the resources of each party, the infrastructure components will be counted, listed and distributed according to the availabilities.
When all these elements are well coordinated, the project will reach its’ maximum effectiveness, disregarding if the engagement is nearshore, offshore or on site.
