We live in a global economy where our business trades and practices are impacted by global affairs and global businesses. There are many innovators and businesses that are looking for ways to optimize their operations and maintain a competitive lead in the global market. One way most business owners that are looking for ways to create B2B/B2C software solutions are shifting their focus towards offshore development centers, popularly known as ODCs.
Establishing an ODC or outsourcing your project to ODC means setting up your remote team in a different location to avail the benefits of cheap labour costs, getting access to skilled developers and have more control over flexibility and scalability in their projects. However, there are also many challenges that come with setting up offshore development centres and considerations that might want to make you reconsider if ODCs are right for your project. We will discuss the various benefits and challenges of offshore development center model so you can assess if it’s the right choice for your project or not.
How to assess if Offshore Development Centre Model is right for my project?
Just how you work on any strategic business decision the best way to assess if offshore development makes sense for your business is to weigh the pros against the cons and making an informed decision. However, when it comes to ODC, there are a few pointers that you can self-assess to determine how fitting or unfitting offshore development centers are for your business. Let’s take a look at them –
Project Evaluation
You should always first assess the project’s current condition and the frequency of times you need software development teams. Is your organization regularly taking IT projects, in need of IT infrastructure or other tech-led business initiatives that needs a reliable IT team available at your disposal? What is the scale, complexity and duration of your projects and do you need a dedicated development team to help you achieve those targets?
Risk to Reward Assessment
Offshore development center has many benefits over traditional in-house hiring or hiring developers near you. However, there are also considerable risks that you should be aware of for conducting a proper risk assessment analysis before trusting any ODC firm with your project. You should check for factors like political stability in the country you’re looking to outsource your project at. For instance, offshore development center in India have many supporting schemes and policies by the government to run their operations. You should also check for the ODC’s policies for IP rights, NDA, data security protocols and adherence to relevant compliances.
Cost Benefit Analysis
You should conduct a proper cost-benefit analysis to gain proper understanding and clarity of the financial impact of setting up an ODC in India, Philippines or other such countries. Make sure to check the average salary gap of your local talents and offshore remote talents, infrastructure expenses and all other relevant cost factors. Make calculative predictions on how much cost you would be saving by outsourcing your projects as compared to keeping it entirely in-house.
Skills and Expertise
Make sure the ODC you’re partnering with has the right skills and expertise in frameworks and services you’re looking for and access to the right developers who have industrial experience working on those platforms. It is a good practice to have your PRD – Project Requirement Document ready for assessing the skills of your developers to the availability of talent of ODC providers.
Benefits of outsourcing project to an Offshore Development Centre
Now that we have some guideline as to what are the factors to assess to know if offshore development center is right choice for you, let us now look at the various benefits of outsourcing project to an offshore development center –
Access to Global Talents
Offshore development centers are generally situated in developing countries like India, Philippines, Brazil and others. The have access to some of the most genius developers available in fields like software development, quality assurance, project management, UI/UX design and other fields that are all crucial to ensure a project’s success and overall quality maintenance.
Scalability & Flexibility
Offshore Development Centres provide clients with the flexibility of scaling and descaling their teams on-the-go. If you need to expand your development workforce you can hire additional talents with quick onboarding process and if you want to downsize your team due to any reasons, there are right policies and processes in place to make that process smooth too. This ensures that you always have talent availability and never pay for more than you need, giving you complete control over your talent hiring budget.
Ability to Focus on Core Business Decisions
One of the biggest benefits of trusting an ODC to handle your development process is that it frees time and resources on your end to utilize your in-house team for dealing with your core business competencies. Your primary team is now able to give more time to strategic decisions, research and development, finding innovative solutions and carry out other priority tasks without worrying about software development, quality assurance and other such tasks. This can give you an edge over your competitors significantly.
Challenges of Outsourcing to Offshore Development Center
While there are many benefits of setting up an ODC as we just saw, there are also considerable challenges that you need to be aware about. Here are the most prominent challenges you can face when working with ODC partners –
Communication Gaps and Language Barriers
One of the biggest challenges that can impact the efficiency of you outsourcing project significantly is the difference in languages, accents and cultural nuances of your remote developer team and your in-house team. You would need to plan a proper communication channel, use top communication tools, establish language proficiency criteria and take other such considerations in mind to ensure this doesn’t interfere with your development process.
Quality Control and chances of Oversight
Quality control for remote development team requires you to establish consistent standards and guidelines that all developers need to adhere to. Since you’re outsourcing your project to a different work environment with different communication methods and cultural norms, there can be differences in the performance of your in-house vs remote teams leading to performance inconsistencies. Make sure to have clear documentation, follow coding industry practices, standardized procedures and proper communication channels to maintain control over quality standards.
Organization Alignment and Onboarding
Integrating the offshore team in your existing team structure can be difficult and need some adjustment period. Since the difference in work culture, methodologies and languages can be so drastic, you would need to provide enough room for the team to settle well with each other. Moreover, you should take proactive initiatives to conduct team bonding activities and using virtual collaboration tools that can help facilitate the bond of your onshore and offshore teams.
Time Zone Differences
Time zone differences can be a barrier to productivity or effective communication on time. If the offshore development centre works as per their timings, you would have no active participation in the development process and find out problems that need to be addressed much later in all the development lifecycle phases. You need to select an ODC that is ready to work a common ground as per your availability and their developers’’ availability and ensure they follow sprint, scrums and agile management to maintain industrial standards.
Final Words
This is the benefits to challenges analysis of setting up your offshore development center. If you have repetitive projects, shortage of certain skillset in your local talent pool or vision of carrying out bigger projects, outsourcing your project to a reliable offshore development agency for getting your remote dedicated development team can be greatly beneficial.
