This post is the first in a series intended to provide my guide to “Right-Sourcing.” This term is what I use to describe finding the best fit for distributed agile augmentation of your software development team. Over a series of posts, we will discuss how aligning your software staffing needs with available options – whether offshore, onshore, local contractors, or FTEs – is critical to the success of your digital transformation projects. Although a variety of best practices keep projects on track, choosing the right approach in the first place is a huge advantage that continues to pay dividends.
Every software project has many moving parts to juggle: “Hard” factors such as headcount, budgets, timelines, and roles; and “soft” ones such as attitude, creativity, culture, and transparency. With business needs top-of-mind, the successful CIO strives to strike a balance among costs, staffing strategies, and technologies that best realizes company goals.
What I describe as Right-Sourcing is a process that seeks to discover the most cost-effective staffing solution that maintains quality, performance, and cultural cohesion standards. While you may consider one of those issues as your driver to look outward for support, each factor should be taken into consideration when choosing the right partner for Agile software development services.
Be careful about considering an outsourcing vendor for a “quick fix.” That mindset will point you toward platoons of affordable talent, but anyone who has ever supervised an outsourced IT project understands that this is at best, an illusion and at worst, a trap.
While some outsourcing companies will claim that they are ideal for every client, project, and business strategy, the reality is otherwise. Everyone has a sweet spot, and no single provider, including Unosquare, is a universally good fit.
In the next series of posts, we will set up the guides to explore your rationale, constraints, scale and software development project management approach. If software development outsourcing continues to be an option worth investigating, test a shortlist of potential partners against those parameters – and be prepared to conclude that what you were sure about in your strategy might change.
Unosquare is, of course, happy to apply this guide’s generalizations to your specific situation if and when you’re ready for the Right-Sourcing conversation. Remember that identifying and deploying the right talent, the right way is the key to success.
