LinkedIn Answers: What hurdles have you faced in outsourcing software services?

Many of you may have seen the recent LinkedIn Answers event last week, which featured questions from a diverse group of LinkedIn users ranging from a Presidential candidate: Barack Obama, founder of Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales, Wall Street Journal columnist and Executive editor at All Things D: Kara Swisher, and two best selling authors: Robert Sutton and Penelope Trunk. The five questions brought in a total of nearly 4000 LinkedIn Answers! Stay tuned to the blog for a final tally of answers as well as the selected best answers from among the thousands of relevant answers.

In the meanwhile, let's continue this week with the featured LinkedIn Answers "Question of the week". This week we have Pavak Shah, Commercial Director at Gateway Technolabs, ask what hurdles one has faced in outsourcing Software Services. Quite an interesting question in this flattened global landscape (just ask Thomas Friedman). The question is still open so if you've a thought or two, feel free to leave your $.02 here.

 

 

 

Interesting question, you may think, but far more interesting are the answers that are streaming in. Here's a sampling of the LinkedIn Answers:

Bill Sequeira | Senior Technology Executive:

I have had experience outsourcing in India, Canada, and Russia. The best experience by a wide margin has been with Russia. The most difficult place to work with has been China because of the language barrier (desisted after a few tries).

Biggest hurdle is having a complete methodology in place, on both sides of the fence, with your own staff taking ownership of outsourced deliverables.

Methodology simplifies communication/language issues, and I would recommend embedding your own staff into the outsourced process to ensure that deliverables are at the standards and usefulness that you expect.

Vaibhav Pandey | Specialist at SAP Labs, India

To my understanding Outsourcing a complete business process is always a challenging job. However, the key things that i have found interesting in my experience are:

1.) Processes are the key to success: Ensure that the company to which you plan to outsource as all the processes in place.

2.) Communication: Communication of the goals, vision and requirements is a must. Its very important that the offshore team clearly understands the requirements and comes up with the same vision.

3.) Core Competency framework: Its very essential that the offshore/outsourced team carries the basic core competencies required to execute the project.

Mallikarjun Kasibhatta | Technology Delivery and Business Development, Accenture

Some of the key hurdles that one may face in a offshoring/outsourcing relationship for software services are:

- Inability to clearly define a successful Operating Model. It needs to be understood and agreed upon by both the vendor and buyer of offshore services. Establish calrity in roles and responsibilities in teams on both sides of the relationship.

- Governance structures and escalation procedures need to realistic and actionable. No point in having a structure and processes in place, that do not work or cannot be put into action with enough rigour. The action part can only be ensured by an enabling organization culture, set of policies that drive the behaviour of people across levels to make things happen

- Communication: put quality people and processes in place on both sides of the  chores/ relationship, so that high levels of mutual trust, reliability and transparency thrive through out the outsourcing relationship

- Expectation management: Sub component of Communication but good to detail a bit on this...set realistic and clear expectations for each other and document key discussions, decisions for future reference of both teams. Give the bad news early and dont 'sit' on it thinking it will go away.

- Track Risks and Issues: track them actively, assign responsibility to people to come up with mitigation plans and drive closure against a date and follow up

- Transition points, hand offs and sign offs: These have to be clearly defined and acheived in time as per the processes defined and only then move to the "next steps"/phases - else they will become big hurdles for offshroing success resulting in loss of valuable time and money

Definitely a lot to think about, although some of the key issues identified were similar across many answers. If you've a thought to add, feel free to add to the collective wisdom here. Also, let us know which specific categories from LinkedIn Answers would you like us to feature next week on the blog.

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