Nick Kurayev, CEO at ScienceSoft, notices that when speaking about the trends of software development outsourcing people focus mainly on the benefits these trends bring. And no one mentions the dark side: software development outsourcing trends can provoke alarming outsourcing risks.
In the article, Mr. Kurayev shows how exactly 3 software outsourcing trends aggravate risks and explains how these risks can be avoided.
Outsourcing for innovative techs
No wonder that outsourcing for such tech innovations as IoT, augmented reality and blockchain gains popularity. These innovations offer attractive benefits, like improvements in decision-making, cybersecurity and employee productivity. And with outsourcing, you can get the cost-effective solutions based on these techs for your business without hiring new personnel. However, unwise outsourcing for innovative techs brings serious investment risks: if a vendor is incompetent in the technology, or you don’t manage to ensure proper adoption of this expensive hyped solution by your employees and clients, outsourcing will be a waste of money.
How to ensure that your money will pay off, and you’ll reap the benefits of the latest technologies?
To minimize investment risks, choose a vendor who already has successful projects with needed innovative techs and offer to use the agile software development methodology for the project. Thus, you can analyze the project progress iteration by iteration, which allows noticing problems early and introducing changes to the project plan on the go or quitting the cooperation with the vendor if they fail to deliver the services you need.
To ensure smooth solution adoption by your employees and clients and find the best way to achieve your business goals with the help of a chosen tech, additionally involve IT consultants. Not to pay double, you may find a software development outsourcing vendor who’s competent in both the innovation and IT consulting.
Cloud sourcing
The cloud sourcing trend presupposes outsourcing cloud software development and maintenance, and the demand for such software outsourcing services is growing significantly across multiple industries. The cloud technology helps to yield cost reduction, scalability and access to your solution from anywhere (which is especially attractive for international enterprises), and with outsourcing a company can get a winning cloud solution without hiring cloud specialists onboard. At the same time, as companies move more and more of their corporate data to the cloud and entrust it to external vendors, this brings about acute cybersecurity risks.
How to mitigate cybersecurity risks cloud sourcing brings?
Consider outsourcing security services to a managed security services vendor specializing in cloud security. Such vendors usually have fresh knowledge about cybersecurity trends and cybercrimes in your industry and have the expertise to ensure that your cloud sourcing experience won’t backfire on you because of security breaches.
Multi-sourcing
This trend makes use of splitting your outsourced project pipeline among several vendors with narrow specializations. Such an approach allows entrusting various outsourcing functions (IT consulting, software development, quality assurance) to the best service providers in the domain while avoiding single vendor lock-in. However, along with involving deep expertise for every component of an outsourced project, you may face the challenge of coordinating your vendors’ activities: the more vendors, the more chance for confusion.
How to prevent misalignment among vendors?
The key idea is to establish centralized management and clear communication and collaboration procedures for all vendors. It’s possible to choose a lead vendor among the outsourcing companies you partner with to bear responsibility for bringing together all processes in the outsourced project pipeline. If you are not sure whom to entrust vendor management, you can manage all your outsourcing vendors yourself for some time before observing which vendor suits this function better.
On a final note
Software outsourcing trends offer multiple benefits, but reaping them is not always easy. Deciding to follow these tendencies, you should think about the proper mitigation of each risk they may cause. Depending on your case, risk management can be fully entrusted to or shared with your service provider.