My reasons to outsource
I mentioned already the top reasons for offshore outsourcing typical for many organizations; let me list some of my own:
- Diversity. Diversity in terms of bringing individual contributor with different background into the team often means a tremendous increase in productivity. A healthy portion of resources with different education, practical background, and way of operating could bring a fresh breath of air in stagnating organization. Also “diversifying” your portfolio of resources might help a great deal to deal with micro factors affecting employment / recruitment landscape of a specific geography.
- Education. In countries such as India, Russia, China you find many people who value education to much higher degree than we do in the states. On one of my teams from St. Petersburg a majority of developers had at least MS and over 40% had Ph.D. That including QA engineers! Needless to say the brain power of the team was absolutely amazing.
- Work Ethics. That doesn’t go across all geographies and companies, but fortunately you still can find outsourcing organizations with resources who’s work ethics are far superior to what you find for example in corporate America.
- Talent Pool. Some outsourcing organizations instead of typical “selling mediocrity in bulk” build their team with top notch experts and people with exceptionally high IQ. Building such a team, no matter in which area of the world takes very long time.
- Processes. Getting process right is time consuming and costly. When ISO or CMM processes are a requirement it’s often much easier to build relationship with a subcontractor who already has those in place.
- Project Management. Project and program management is often something that a small software organization can not afford (or more often VPE can’t sell his execs / team on the need for it). Many, especially Indian vendors have that in perfect shape.
- Cost. While I do not believe that offshore guarantees cost savings I do believe that there is a huge potential there especially with careful execution of multi-sourcing or/and micro-sourcing strategies.
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[...] During those good old days when a Ph.D. from a 3rd world country was only $8K a year cost advantage was so profound that that it was practically impossible to resist the temptation of outsourcing. Today if Ph.D. is asking for $40K the chances are s/he bought the diploma on some black market. With average saving of mare 20-30% it’s not about cost advantage anymore, we go offshore for variety of reasons, goals and objectives. Defining those should be your first step before you even consider vendor search and daunting task of picking perfect destination. “If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.” [Seneca] It should be set of your own objectives, reasons and goals specific to you organization, not taken verbatim form some book or my blog (even though I think you can find a lot of helpful ideas in Top Reasons for Outsourcing or My Reasons to Outsource). [...]
Pingback by Offshore, Nearshore, Right Shore, Best Shore… oh My « Pragmatic Outsourcing | February 26, 2009
[...] suspected circular reference here: take a look at my earlier posts Top reasons for outsourcing and My reasons to outsource; if your reasons for outsourcing are not listed there and more so after some reading and thinking [...]
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