Top 5 tips to know before Outsourcing your Custom Software Development

1. Evaluate vendor’s Communication Plans

The major challenge in outsourcing a job to an offshore vendor is — communication issues. Assessing your vendor’s communication skills is a paramount step in ensuring your project’s success.

To establish better comprehension and clarity of the project between your offshore team and your in-house employees, you’ll need to overcome certain barriers such as languages, time zones, and cultural differences. So, you must carefully evaluate your vendor’s communication plans before hiring them. This can be done by setting up one on one video sessions with their business analysts, developers, and project managers.

2. Project Delivery Methodologies

Review vendor’s delivery methodologies and make sure the entire project life cycle is supported with appropriate documentation and approval processes. Before proceeding with an outsourced software development project, you must ensure that your vendor is providing precise documentation that explains the requirements, responsibilities, understanding, delivery time and the scope of the project. These documents will help you to align your expectations with the vendor.

Figuring out the right model to deliver your workloads is the initial thing you must do while outsourcing a custom software development project. You can easily figure out this by assessing the abilities, experience, and vulnerabilities of your in-house development team. Apart from that, it is vital for you to assess the expertise and skills of your project management team.

3. Technological Capabilities

Choosing vendors that don’t have enough technical expertise in fulfilling your requirements can wreak havoc on your project. Some vendors can easily deceive companies by showing fake portfolios & descriptions about their previous projects and tech offerings.

To avoid these shortcomings, before you sign an agreement, you must run a deep analysis of their technological and technical. During this assessment, you can easily measure their expertise in handling programming languages, frameworks, and tools.

4. Project Management Methodologies

Lack of proper project management & industry-standard methodologies is the biggest challenge that most companies face with their offshore development teams. An unstable resource pool in your project can cause irregular deployment that will eventually lead to the failure of your project. You can counter this issue by finding vendors with consistent industry project management methodologies.

A Certified Project manager can work between stakeholders and the technical team and can help in the requirement elicitation from the business stakeholders or product owners and document the system specification.

5. Contract Services Agreement

Before you sign on a vendor, you have to engage a legal team to review the contract agreement which explains the Professional Services, Roles & Responsibilities of both parties,
Statement of Work (SoW), Non-disclosure agreement (NDA), Master service agreement (MSA), Project Deliverables, Acceptance Criteria, Change Management procedures, Billing procedures, penalty clauses, Warranties, Intellectual Property clauses like ESCROW, Security Compliances, Data Protection, Confidentiality, etc.