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Risks Management in
Offshore Outsourcing
The
most important thing is to find out if your offshore outsourcing
provider is aware of these risks and has a plan to either mitigate
it or eliminate it altogether. It is a well known fact that the
offshore outsourcing (or any type of outsourcing for that
matter) carries known and unknown risks. The important thing is
to find out if your offshore outsourcing provider is aware of these
risks and has a plan to either mitigate it or eliminate it altogether.
In this post, I will share some of known risks related to offshore
outsourcing.
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Risk
One: Requirement Misunderstanding
- Many a times it happens that the requirements
get written in a hurry in an attempt to get the project started
as soon as possible. This is okay if the project is being
done in-house. However if it is being outsourced, it becomes
a risk. If the specifications are not written properly or
are incomplete or enough details are not provided, the project
will have problems on various fronts such as
Project
Understanding - what needs to be done and delivered, Project
Planning - putting together firm dates for delivery,
Change Controls - lots of change control will be generated
later on in the project life cycle, which could obviously
delay the project as well as increase the cost.
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Per
the study conducted by Software Engineering Institute, not enough
understanding or the clarity around the customer requirements is
one of the top reasons on why software projects fail or get delayed.
In
order to mitigate this risk, make sure that your provider has gone through
the requirement understanding phase before starting the coding phase. The
requirement understanding phase should have multiple rounds of discussion
with all the involved parties to fully understand and document their
requirements in the Software Specification Documents. This phase is
independent of technology selected for the project. The provider should
also prepare the HTML mock-ups which is an excellent way to capture the
application flow. These mock-ups should reused during the coding phase for embedding the application method calls.
Requirements Development: The Requirements Development phase is about
gathering the needs of the customer and translate into requirements
specification of what the system must do.
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Requirements
Development consists of three related activities:
1.
Gathering User Requirements, which
is accomplished by interviewing the potential users about
the system they want, building the interactive prototypes,
writing the Requirement Specification documents.
2.
Analyzing Requirements, which
is about determining the acceptability, implement ability,
and testability.
3.
Inspecting Requirements,
which is accomplished by discussing the proposed requirement
in detail. The goal is to identify the issues and errors related
to the requirements ambiguities or discrepancies. The deliverable
from this phase is a detailed requirements document which
should get jointly reviewed and signed off. Your company's
project manager or designated contact will need to review
the status of any deliverables as well as any testing done,
and be available to communicate frequently with the vendor
project manager.
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Most
project problems occur to infrequent or poor communication between
the firm outsourcing, and the vendor. But the "no news
is good news" approach is rarely true; in fact, the opposite
will often occur. One of the easiest ways to reduce this risk, and
to catch problems early on, is to initiate frequent communication,
with regular times specified for project reviews.
Differences in development
methodology can occur, if one firm prefers an RUP approach with exacting
specifications, while another firm prefers agile methodologies. One firm
may have a preferred tool in place for source code control, or for coding
standards, or for testing builds. These issues can often be worked out by
communicating the reason for each approach, and then choosing a consistent
methodology. Most frequently, you will ask the offshore team to adopt your
in-house methodologies, but you may be surprised to discover that they
have methodologies or tools that equal yours, especially if they have
significant experience in a technology.
This
is where teamwork and communication between the project and
development team managers is critical. Related to methodologies
are evaluating how the firm being outsourced to handles sudden requests
for large volumes or rapid delivery. Check on how flexible and scalable
your vendor is, and whether they have processes in place for hiring
additional staff as required for larger projects. This includes
having sufficient project management staff in place to ensure adequate
monitoring and communication with your firm. Ask them: "What
is the smallest project you have worked on? The largest project?"
to help determine whether they can scale to meet your needs. You
will also want to check references for projects that are similar
to yours.
Contributed By: Offshore Software Development India -
An Offshore Software Development company India offers a wide range
of services including business process outsourcing, onsite technical
consulting, offshore software development, and product lifecycle
management.
http://www.hanusoftware.com 212
Carnegie Center, Suite 206, Princeton, NJ 08540 USA. Email: hanuseo@gmail.com
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