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Software outsourcing is a great opportunity for startups, small businesses, or big enterprises to scale up, access additional expertise, or reach new goals quicker. However, to make such a partnership successful, both sides should make some efforts to guarantee smooth and easy cooperation.
Supplementing your in-house department with a dedicated team is challenging, but if you get prepared enough, you will get decent results. In this article, we collected the best experience of GBKSOFT, a top software development company, and turned it into a few practical tips.
How to Start Cooperation with Outsourced Team
So, you have come to a decision to cooperate with an outsourced team of developers. The reasons may be different: your internal IT team can’t cover your current needs in development as they are focused on other tasks, or you need a bunch of specialists with expertise your employees lack.
In any case, it’s important to have a great kickoff. Here are the main steps you require to go through.
Find a right partner
Finding a suitable outsourcing team is a long-term goal. It will definitely take some time. Firstly, you should determine the criteria to choose among a huge market of software outsourcing companies. Where should the company be situated? What expertise should it have? What rates are you expecting? Do you need to cooperate with big veterans of the market or a small but efficient studio will be enough as well?
After you create a picture of your ideal partner, go through Google, social media, tech blogs, and listings like Clutch or GoodFirms. Contact the ones you liked, evaluate how they communicate with you, check the estimation and offer they provide. If you are satisfied with how they operate, congrats! You found your team.
Sign a contract
The contract is important, as everything you will write there. A good contract should clearly define the responsibilities of both sides and cover all possible controversial situations. This way, in case of any problems, you may always refer to the documents and find solutions.
Manage expectations
Take enough time to find a common ground before starting your work. Usually, software development projects are quite long. Your in-house team will be bound to work along with the outsourced team, and it’s critical to make sure that everybody is on the same side.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions in the initial stage. The more you discuss here, the better the whole development process goes. Stay open to the dialogue: any outsourced team needs to obtain enough input data to plan the project.
How to Prepare Your In-House Team for Cooperation
How to synchronize two teams with different backgrounds? From your side, you may prepare your team and help them adjust to new conditions.
Prepare technical documentation
Every developer needs some time to understand the organization’s codebase. Technical documentation may help the outsourced team to find their way around code quicker, and hence, the initial onboarding will take less time.
Establish efficient communication
An outsourced team is usually located in another country, often even in the other timezone. Hence, you need to work out a system, where both teams can communicate easily, and there is minimum idle time. Wherever your outsourced developers are, you will definitely have an overlap in working hours, and that time should be allotted for calls.
Moreover, you can take advantage of time difference: for example, when you resort to offshoring, you will have around 5-8 hours between you and your outsourcing partner. While your workday in the US has come to end, developers in Ukraine may be in the middle of their workday. When you get to work the next day, you may already see the results of the work that was done you were sleeping.
Use collaboration tools
Thanks to cloud technologies, it’s easy to work on the same project from different parts of the world. Use remote tools to simplify communication and store data. This way, nobody won’t need to ask for updates and wait for an email to proceed with their tasks.
Wiki-like tools like Confluence allows saving any data on the project, so anyone can access it easily. Trello, Jira, and other task managers help to structure the scope of work and keep track of the project progress. And we can’t mention communication tools like Google Meets, Zoom, Slack, and others.
Implement Agile
Agile is one of the most popular approaches to software development management. Agile, at its core, says about dividing the whole project into limited sprints, and this grants higher flexibility and productivity to the development process.
As for the cooperation of two teams, Agile may be very useful, as both of them may work in different sprints, but to achieve one goal. Agile methodologies and techniques will help increase productivity, but keep enough space for sudden changes or challenges.
Understand culture
There is always a chance of conflict between two teams. There might be a misunderstanding or miscommunication, or people may not be used to the other ways of how things can be done.
The situation may cause a lot of pressure, considering that not only the difference in work ethics may be different, but in culture as well. It may be hard to find a common language for people from diverse cultures, especially in long-term and close cooperation.
However, if your team is ready to be understanding and can openly and politely communicate, conflict can be solved before escalating into big problems. Learn about another team country, learn about the culture of their company as well, and encourage non-toxic respectful communication.
In conclusion
Outsourcing is great, and it can really help companies grow and evolve. However, the success story may be born only when the cooperation between the client and an outsourced team is built on trust and leads to efficient results.
We hope that our suggestions will help you to gain benefits from outsourcing. Good luck!