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Ensuring An Offshoring Success
Multi-shore development is a growing trend but simply following the low cost model around the globe is no guarantee of achieving timely software development that actually meet business needs. Excellent processes are essential if organisations are to match the diverse skill sets available to business demands for ever faster application development and ever more efficient service management, argues Noor Hussain, Sales & Marketing Director, Smart421.
In an increasingly competitive and challenging economic environment few organisations can countenance lengthy development projects. New applications need to be in place within six months if they are to deliver quantifiable value.
Matching this demand with the equally pressing need for lower cost development is creating a significant challenge. While offshore resources offer the chance to cut development costs in half, the offshore model is no panacea. Lapses in communication or cultural confusion can be extremely expensive.
If organisations are to achieve the rapid development demanded by the business, they need to combine UK based rapid prototyping and project management with offshore coding expertise. But just how can this multi-tier process be achieved without adding untenable project overhead and business risk?
Influential Trend
The rise in offshore developments has been one of the most influential business trends over the past decade, fuelling extraordinary economic growth, primarily in India, and enabling a far lower development cost for organisations struggling to afford high priced UK expertise.
However, exploiting the offshore model has been far from plain sailing. Many organisations have struggled to manage the interface between the UK user population and offshore development team. Problems in communication, culture and expectation have created delays in development projects and added unexpected cost.
Offshore companies are extremely good at turning precisely defined requirements into code. The process is slick, fast and extremely good value. They are not, however, good at interpreting requirements from a set of imprecise documents or specifications.
With many UK organisations now looking for rapid development to meet fast changing business needs, there is a clear gap in expectation that can only cause misunderstanding and delay. As the focus now shifts from traditional, highly scoped developments that can take up to two years to deliver to a sixth month turnaround, any delay is completely unacceptable. Just where does this leave the offshore model?
Experienced Interface
Despite the increasing salaries, offshore development still offers at least a 50% saving on UK based development costs. How can any blue-chip operation justify its failure to exploit this resource? But unless those tasked with the prototyping activity understand the UK business environment and can deliver detailed specifications that exactly match user requirements, the offshore model breaks down.
Furthermore, while Indian offshore companies offer fantastic skills in traditional technologies - from C++ developers to SAP and Oracle experts - they typically lack familiarity with leading edge technologies and architectures. As a result organisations are reliant on expensive UK expertise in areas such as IBM WebSphere or Microsoft BizTalk. However, there is a growing market in Eastern Europe - primarily Poland, Romania and Hungary - offering these leading edge skills at a fraction of the UK cost.
But just how is an organisation to leverage this diverse skill set over multiple continents whilst ensuring the true needs of the business are met within the rapid timeframe now dictated by the fast pace of change?
Many companies have already been burnt by their foray into offshore development. Managing the cultural gap between local business needs and one or many offshore providers is simply too complex and challenging to deliver quantifiable value.
There is, as a result, a growing move towards multi-shore activities - either creating an in house team tasked with delivering an interface between the business and the offshore resource or outsourcing that role to a third party. The on shore team leverages local business expertise to project manage the development as well as assessing and defining user requirements in a way that can be utilised effectively by the offshore developers.
This 'interface' role enables organisations to attain the cost reductions offered by offshoring and near shoring, while benefiting from mature and local project facilitation offered by a UK operation.
Process Control
Mitigating the risk associated with offshore development in this way is delivering significant benefits to organisations across every vertical market. But it requires more than an understanding of the offshore environment and cultural differences. Simply sending an in house team to India to build a relationship with developers, while valuable, is not enough.
If organisations are to really harness the power of the offshore model whilst enabling the onshore prototyping required to enable rapid development, they need excellent control over the entire development process. From initial prototype to transitioning services offshore and ensuring tight Service Level Agreements are set and met, there is no room for gaps in process or lapses in communication.
Business Value
However, it is also important to combine tried and tested standards based approaches with the agility required to meet business demands for rapid software development. Good processes are not enough if organisations are unable to respond quickly to business needs. The ability to scale up local as well as offshore development capability is vital to ensure project timescales can be kept within the tight six month deadline increasingly demanded by the highly competitive economic environment.
The cost reductions offered by offshore and near shore resources provide compelling arguments for changing the way companies employ IT services. But focusing on cost alone will undermine the value of the development. Combining excellent cultural and business understanding in both on shore and offshore environments with standards based project management is essential to ensure a rapid, transparent development process, irrespective of location.
Noor Hussain, Sales & Marketing Director, Smart421
ENDS
View the published article
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