Although it is extremely tempting to want to do everything yourself when running a business, it is just not feasible if you are trying to scale up, trying to reduce operational costs, or trying to improve your company’s performance levels. When going at it alone, without additional partners, many of these factors end up causing you to incur additional expenses because they divert your attention away from your core competencies. The solution to this is to understand your business’s core competencies (what you do best) that allow you to play to its strengths and then outsource all other business functions to an offshore development partner. In doing so, not only do you identify what your strengths and weaknesses are as a company, but you maximize your ability to be efficient and flexible while reducing operational costs.
What Is An Offshore Development Center and Who Requires One?
An offshore development center is an extended and integrated offshore team that is dedicated to supporting the contracting company, located in another country. Offshore development centers are popular business models utilized by enterprise companies and startups needing creation and maintenance solutions, software, project management, and testing, as well as technical and customer support. A lot of IT companies use offshore creation development and testing for products as these products can be deployed much faster through an ODC due to the availability of specialized skills and infrastructure. Common benefits of using an ODC include timely delivery of projects, knowledge retention, autoscaling of IT, reduce costs in infrastructure, reliable operations, and access to the best skills and technology in the marketplace.
Staff Augmentation services being offered is a core thing to consider while hiring any IT offshore development company. Hire a dedicated team of developers and let them take control of the end-to-end process in developing and implementing solutions for your business.
What Should You Be Outsourcing to ODC’s?
You want to outsource anything that doesn’t fall squarely within your core competencies. This could be the designs needed for business visual elements like logos, business cards, and brochures. It could be your website app development or it could be the content required for your social media platforms, press releases, and website blog – which is a part of digital marketing services. Beyond this, information technology like IoT based product design, web or mobile-based system development and financial services like taxes and payroll are also common areas that are outsourced.
What to Look for in an Offshore Development Center?
If you have decided to hire an offshore development center, Here are TOP 10 fundamentals that you should be looking for when going through the vetting process.
1) How Confidential Is The ODC?
This is the first thing that should be looked at if your company is dealing with trade secrets and intellectual property. The offshore development company needs to be open to signing intellectual property protection policies including a general agreement, non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and employee confidentiality contract.
2) What Does Their Hiring Process Look Like – Is It Familiar?
You want to make sure that those who are hired onto the offshore development team go through a similar hiring process as those whom you hire in-house. When the hiring process is very familiar to one another, this ensures that there won’t be a clash in company culture, values, and technical skills. After all, you need an offshore team that will mesh well with the in-house employees.
3) What Does Their Track Record Look Like and Are Financials Sound?
Take a look at projects they have completed in the past. Have they worked with organizations that are similar to yours and do they have experience in your industry? You want a company that will understand your workflows, your hiring process, and your company culture. Beyond this, make sure to look at how issues were resolved in the past as this is a good indication of how future issues will be taken care of. Finally, make sure to vet their financial stability as this helps you determine if your partnership can survive in the long-term. You can measure the value and performance of any company relative to other companies through analytics if required.
4) Do They Have Long-Term Policies in Place for Team Deployment?
You want to take a look at what type of policies the ODC has in place for long-term partnerships, contracts, and employment. If they are expecting their team to be deployed with them for long periods of time, this ensures that you will have consistency in the work produced for your company.
5) What Does Their Technical Expertise in Testing via POC/Trial Look Like?
Your offshore development company should have the technological capability and expertise in testing POC/Trials. To find this out, ask about which development tools they use, what cloud platforms they work on, and how many technologies they have experience in.
6) Are They Flexible in Handling Extra Work?
Make sure that the offshore development team can handle extra work on short notice. Figure out if they are flexible in taking on additional work and if so, how turnaround times are impacted as such.
7) What Do Their Billing Policies Look Like?
Ensure that their billing policies match up with your company’s payroll schedule and budget. This prevents chaos, delayed work, and speeds up efficiency. When everyone is paid on time and valued, you have happy staff with increased productivity. ODC has various business model to work out.
8) How Is The Team Processes and Communication?
Communication is absolutely critical as wrong communication can trigger mistrust, poor work quality, and create difficulties where none were needed. When using an offshore development team, you want weekly meetings held, be in contact with a project manager, have a trusted and vetted method of knowledge transfer. Does Offshore team have the capability to travel (Not only CEO but the actual team)?
9) Does The Time Zone Difference Work?
In order to resolve issues quickly, you want to have an overlap between your local and remote work hours. Do they have local representatives or local team who can liaison with your team? If your offshore development team and your in-house team have a reasonable time difference of four to six hours, this allows for issues that crop up at the end of the day to be handled outside of regular work hours by an overseas team. Beyond this, having different time zones eases the implementation of the 24-hour development cycle as your local team will not have to work into the night to get the changes in before the next development cycle as your offshore team can catch you up.
10) Do They Understand What Your Q&A Process Is?
Your offshore development team must understand the quality assurance process that your company uses in order to determine whether a product or service meets the markets specific requirements. Without this understanding, your company will not be able to manufacture reliable products. An excellent Q&A process will increase customer confidence and improve a company’s credibility while increasing efficiency.
Before getting involved with an offshore development company, it is critical to evaluate them carefully as any of the above points can actually make or break your partnership, with the latter costing your precious resources, time, and money. It is recommended that you make a short list of a few contenders and check whether they will allow your company to focus in on its core competencies. If the company you are considering does not fulfill your project mission statement, has a poor track record, or does not have the technical expertise needed, move on to another one.
If you are looking for the right IT service provider that can nurture your requirements and follow the ethical business process, get in touch with us now.
Jignesh Thanki 