Offshore development for your project: tips, advantages and ways for avoiding risks

In a highly competitive environment, business owners should pay special attention to creating their digital products. In this case, companies cannot do well without qualified developers. IT outsourcing means involving a third-party contractor in performing certain tasks. They are usually not included in the main range of activities of a particular company.

The customer can receive the most complete and high-quality set of services without the necessity of maintaining its own IT department.

Remote (offshore) programming allows companies to save their time, and focus on considerable goals. At that time, the necessity to follow terms and references will be delegated to outsourced staff.

Offshore development projects usually include the following services:

• creating a product: application, website, etc.;

• reporting at different stages of the project;

• fixing bags;

• testing;

• product installation and integration.

The customer receives many other benefits if choosing a competent offshore staff. Many opportunities become achievable since it is much easier to find generalizing and narrowly focused specialists.

The features of outsourcing programming

To start, IT outsourcing allows the customer to receive high-quality services in the field of informatization while reducing their administrative costs. Stable IT system operations, their scaling, protection against failures, and solving unforeseen tasks are ensured. The features are related to getting the following issues:

• high-quality services provided by a specialized IT company. The staff usually have the appropriate experience at the time of ordering and can offer some alternative solutions;

• low price, as the customer pays only for the necessary services and doesn’t pay for production costs;

• no overhead costs for employees (vacation, sick leave, insurance, workplace). All those issues are provided by the outsourced company;

• fast decision-making as tasks are delegated. Management distributes tasks between team members, so the customer only needs to check the result;

• process planning is necessary for ensuring that the task will be finished on time. So, it is easy for the customer to see at what stage the project is at any period.

As it was mentioned, offshore outsourcing allows to hire highly specialized people and companies who can perform certain functions and make them faster, better, cheaper than others. An example of this is the global transferring of call centers to India, which provides significant resource-saving (salaries, premises organization, telecommunications, taxes, etc.). For mutual understanding, all the contractor's services, the conditions and terms of their provision, the scope of work, etc. must be agreed upon beforehand. In most cases, they are regulated by the subscription service agreement concluded between the parties.

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How to evaluate the offshore staff work?

The quality of the programmers' work can be validated by orders of magnitude even within a single software project. We are not talking about lines of code or the number of assets. There is no big problem writing a lot of code or edit numerous pictures. The main task is to avoid numerous mistakes even at the first stages. The quality of outsourced personnel work is ensured consistently by the following measures:

• Streamlined hiring system. Lead outsourced companies practice interviews system with the companies’ experienced developers, who can evaluate the candidates’ qualifications level.

• Building a system of personnel selection within the company. This allows to identify unmotivated workers; a developer can be fired if he is consistently rejected by different project teams.

• Implementing the assessment and career development system. There must be set both professional and managerial goals with clear time frames.

• Effective personnel training system. The staff education and skills must correspond to the requirements of the market. That is why outsourced companies pay special attention to the employees’ retraining to the new conditions.

Over time, market requirements may change and, accordingly, project requirements may be revised. As these points are impossible to avoid, project managers need to know how to deal with them. Any change must be formulated, evaluated in different directions (labor intensity, cost, date shift, risks), and accepted or not accepted for execution. In other words, the process of evaluating each change is aimed at understanding its true purposes.

Managing project to the outsourced team

Outsourcing is a great business tool that helps a company focus on the most important processes. This is especially useful for young projects: a growing team often has to complete a great number of tasks at the start-up stage and further. However, the principles of transferring business processes are approximately the same for startups and big companies.

1. Establish communication.

You don’t have to control all the processes but it’s better to keep in touch with project managers. Weekly meetup is the best way to discuss the team’s activities and say about corrections that must be proceeded. Remember that the team may have questions in the process, so point out the time when you can give answers.

2. Formulate the goals.

At first, describe your issue as a whole, and mention details only after that. What is this project for and what tools will be used? Personnel selection should be based on this information. Not only professional but also personal qualities must be taken into account.

3. Point out the main stages of the project.

The step will help to avoid time delays and increase the team members’ motivation. Even though programming is a rather unpredictable process, try to imagine the results that you want to gain at the end of the main stages. It is even better to do such an evaluation together with other team members for taking all the possible risks into account.

4. Test intermediate results.

It is not necessary to perform full testing at the end of each stage. Anyway, the more points you will check, the better result you will get at the end. Testing may be performed both by the outsourced or full-time QA managers.

Remember that feedback is the best way to get useful software at the end. Point out your requirements, of course, basing on the specialists’ ability to implement them in life. Developers must have enough time for performing tasks at different stages but deadlines must be clear.

Difficulties that you may face

Project management takes place by taking into account functionality, quality, and deadlines. In case of increased requirements to one of the three points, the other two ones usually worsen. Therefore, competent planning is a trial to find a balance between quality, functionality, and speed. Aside from that, offshore development involves the following risks:

• Configuration management.

The project usually consists of executable program modules, a large collection of project documents, program texts, and executable code. All of them are knitted according to versions and are interconnected. The new requirement must be tested, and for this, it must be included in the test plans.

• Ignoring details.

It is impossible to plan the timing of the project without detailed preliminary planning. This requirement must be strict enough, and its implementation should be monitored carefully.

• Fuzzy hierarchy.

New inputs come to the company very often and the team must be able to respond to them. So, building a hierarchical structure is useful only when the departments do not interact with each other on the operational level. Otherwise, it will take a lot of time and effort to decide on changes at an interdivisional level. A common understanding of the issue between the client and contractor is extremely important for managing offshore developing projects. The terms of reference, the special document of requirements usually help to clarify different methodologies.

It is necessary to constantly assess the state of the project and the possible risks that may affect the implementation of the software on time. Outsourcing development with “Yojji” means competent planning, timely execution, and high-quality testing. This approach allows clients to clearly identify project problems and constantly work to fix them. We have got experience in working on different projects, providing transparency, high quality, and meeting deadlines. Need a digital product? Yojji is ready to provide you with non-trivial solutions!