Big businesses and their big demands have given outsourcing a big boost. Outsourcing as a concept and as an industry has seen a tremendous growth. Multi million dollar IT industry, uses outsourcing services for the various reasons and benefits it offers. Two companies come in mutual contract to get their work done. Business owners are always on the hunt of finding an outsourcing partner as they think that it is going to allow them to scale their businesses to new heights and relieve them to work on their business instead of in their business. I do believe that creating successful outsourcing solutions plays an important role behind scaling any business.
However, imagine if the outsourcing partner has his/her own agenda. I mean that you trust someone and they take you for a ride. This does happen in business; people do have some very bad experiences. Some people are very good with their convincing and selling skills. Once you are impressed you will not hesitate offering them the work.
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- The partner himself needs to have technical knowledge and should be able to discuss technical issues based on the knowledge acquired by him either practically or by experience and not by involving his technical staff. He should be aware of project status and project requirement at any stage of the project.
- You might be given ideas pertaining to the buying of readymade software solutions for easing of work, which would be beneficial to the partner and expense to you. They might say they were not hired as an expert who can do everything from scratch.
- They might try to convince you on hourly pay rather than fixed pay. Due to the hourly mode of payment, they might keep on extending the deadlines. Moreover it gives them the leverage of not getting bounded in completion of work in the set time frame. It might also be the case where he himself does not know how long the particular task is going to take.
- Make sure that you assign task with a clear SOW (scope of work) document. If your outsourcing partner agrees to start on the basis of verbal SOW then be ready to bear the loss and headache of work incompletion, the project going in a totally different direction and the project coming to a standstill.
The world of software and software related projects is growing and changing at a great pace and it is very difficult to maintain that pace. In order to maintain that speed you outsource part of your work to other experts in view that they will deliver the best. But that does not happen always and you end up paying the price, so whenever you select an outsourcing partner make sure that he knows what you want him to do and how he delivers the same.