Offshore outsourcing can become a highly complicated process in the case of more sophisticated and large-scale projects. To err is human, and you can make mistakes too, and that’s completely understandable.
To reduce the number of mistakes, today we’re going to discuss 15 mistakes to avoid in offshore outsourcing. Let’s cut to the chase right away.
1. Not Researching Properly Before Hiring
Research is the biggest part of decision-making when it comes to choosing the right offshoring vendor. There are a lot of intricate details that help you determine the eligibility of the outsourcing vendor you’re planning to partner with.
A lack of proper research can cause your project to go downhill really fast when you’re working with a highly incompatible team.
Take the following steps to increase the efficiency of your research:
- Interview multiple vendors to create a shortlist before making the final decision
- Determine the amount of projects they work on at a time and the amount of time they’ll devote to your project
- Go through the portfolio and past experiences of every vendor to find the right one that suits your current business needs the most.
- Understand the background of your team and individual team members
- Determine exactly who’ll be working on your project after you sign the contract and if their expertise matches your requirements.
- Always remember to ask for references on similar successful projects.
- Thoroughly conversate with them to understand their level of experience with your industry market and market-associated challenges.
2. Treating The In-House Team With More priority
An offshore team works as an extension of your in-house team. When you give preferential treatment to your internal team members, you create an “us vs. them” mentality, and it’s one of the most horrible things you can do as a product owner.
When the offshore team doesn’t feel like they’re getting as valued as they deserve to be, the team morale goes down really fast, and it starts affecting their productivity and delivery cycles.
How do you keep it fair? Simple. Whatever you’re doing for the in-house team, do the same for the external team as well.
Offering your internal developers a training course? Offer the same course to the extended team members as well. Even if they don’t need it, they’ll appreciate the gesture.
Throwing a party in-house? Offer food vouchers or gift cards as party favors to your offshore team.
Has your team achieved a new milestone? Praise them through internal messaging tools or through an uplifting email.
These steps may seem small, but they help build team loyalty and mutual trust really fast.
3. Focusing on Cost Management Only
One of the many benefits that offshore outsourcing provides is the saved costs. Since most vendors come in with their own tech stack and pre-received training, you only have to worry about hiring the right people and offering fair payment, which still turns out to be lower than most full-time employees with the same qualification.
However, some business owners get so immersed in the cost-saving aspect of the entire process they just end up hiring whoever is offering the cheapest rates. While this seems like a great idea upfront, it’s an easy way to ruin the entire project.
If any vendor is charging low from other similar agencies from their region, this means they have fewer upkeep expenses, meaning their services are not as good as the other vendors that are operating within the same region.
When you’re hiring vendors who offer subpar services, your end product will suffer as a result, and in terms, of your brand reputation.
4. Not Clearing Up The Requirements
Some business owners just expect the offshore team to pick up the requirements without any proper communication or clear explanations.
Not everyone comprehends information the same way, and it applies even more to offshore vendors. Since you’re discussing your project with someone who lives in an entirely different culture and environment, language barriers and unclear expressions can hinder the information exchange.
To make sure nothing is getting lost in translation or you’re not missing out on any vital details, try to convey visual information by creating short videos or visual infographics to accompany your requirements documentation.
5. Not Considering The Time Zone
While offshoring is great for creating your own Ocean’s 11 developers, you also have to keep the time zone differences in mind.
Everyone’s work hours differ according to their respective time zones, and you have to be mindful of the difference for each individual member.
You can’t simply call a video conference at 9 a.m. your time when one of your members is going to bed cause it’s 3 a.m., and another member is barely awake because it’s 5 in the morning.
The way to mitigate this issue is to either create a flexible work schedule for everyone or to create an overlapping schedule that falls under the standard hours for everyone.
6. Not Validating The Team Skillset
Offshoring grants you access to a specialized group of developers with niche skills and high expertise. But still, there are times when a PO makes vague requirements, and downplays the skillset of the devs when they fail to deliver.
Actions like these can crush the morale of any team member and in the long run, the project can suffer from having a deliverable that is not on par with current market requirements.
7. Lacking The Right Tech To Support The Team
Choosing the right tech stack is a big part of software development. When you’re onboarding offshore team members it’s easy to get lost in an overabundance of tools and not make the right choice.
When the team doesn’t have the right tech stack to complete the project, the project often comes to a complete halt since the developers can’t make proper progress until they get access to the right tools or they can get sufficient training to work with the current tools.
8. Treating Team Members Like Robots
At the end of the day, regardless of the outsourcing method or capacity of individuals, all your team members are human, and you should always keep that in mind.
Overworking is a serious issue in the world of development, and it can cause severe physical and psychological issues in the long run. Team welfare is more important than team progress, since without the team being in proper condition there may not be any progress at all.
Team welfare doesn’t just come from resting either. It’s about you being compassionate to all the team members. Engage them in small chitchats, up their morale with words of praise or small gifts. A little kindness goes a long way.
9. Micromanagement
Micromanagement is such a big mistake that if the list was a ranking list it’d be number one. Micromanagement can destroy the morale and work progress of even the best of development teams.
Most modern offshore development teams now follow agile practices, and one of the best characteristics of agile teams is that they’re all self-managed. When you constantly interfere with their decision-making process with micromanagement, you’re actively hindering the progress of your own product development.
10. Treating The Sales Team As Royalty
The sales team is a team that specializes in the exaggeration of different information to land sales. But that’s not to their discredit, it’s their nature of work. While recruiting an offshore team, many make the mistake of continuously contacting the sales and executive team instead of the team in question.
When you’re asking the sales team, you’re receiving a colorized version of information that doesn’t accurately depict the extension of the skillset that the team has. As a result, you don’t get to evaluate the team based on their skill set.
This can often result in pairing up with an underwhelming team that fails to deliver the expected results in the long run.
11. Neglecting Workforce Diversity
Most business owners or product owners completely neglect the issues that may arise from the diversity between the onshore and offshore teams. Cultural barrier is very real, and it can affect the success rate of offshore projects.
Here are a few things you can do to ensure that your output isn’t affected by the creative and cultural differences.
- Conduct regular cultural awareness workshops to understand cultural differences between individual team members.
- Deploy culturally compatible and appropriate resources at all your offshore locations.
- Ensure that your extended team possesses the required communication skills to ensure seamless collaboration between your in-house team and external team.
- The culture of the end-user is just as important. Always convey the culture of the end users to deliver a quality product to meet the needs of the target audience.
12. Choosing Vendors That Are Falling Behind Modern Trends
Sometimes, a business might partner with a vendor that is constantly falling behind on modern software development trends or is not taking enough steps to upgrade its existing tech stack.
When the team working on a project is operating with an outdated tech stack, the product is sure to become irrelevant and outdated soon since it won’t support modern systems and devices.
Here’s what you can do to prevent this mistake:
- Link up with a team that is always up to date with the latest trends
- Work with teams that are adaptable to any kind of changes, and use the right collaboration tools to stay up to date while working together
- Choose partners that follow agile practices for higher transparency
- Sign up with a team that follows the best industry practices and prioritizes quality above all else
13. Not Keeping Enough Disaster-Recovery Plans & Backups At Hand
The current world is becoming more and more dangerous due to climate change and the socio-political instability that comes along with it. With the risk of such an unstable environment around us, every business and vendor should keep one or more disaster recovery plans at hand.
If you partner with an agency that doesn’t maintain any kind of emergency backup or doesn’t comply with disaster-recovery safety rules and regulations, you’re putting your company’s intellectual data at high risk.
In case of any kind of malicious attack, your project data can get lost or corrupted. Without maintaining backup files, the entire project can result in a total loss.
14. Insufficient Internal Management
With offshoring, all your company operations get completed thousands of miles away from you. While your work is still getting done and all the complete procedures are contributing to the company, they simply lack management oversight compared to when the actions are executed on-site.
The mistake here for most business owners is to outright assume that nothing is getting done. While it’s true that manual oversight offers the satisfaction of knowing the task is getting done, offshore teams can still get the job done even without constant oversight.
With regular communication and collaboration through remote tools, you can easily impose management oversight on the offshore team to get the desired results.
15. Neglecting Security Practices
The modern software development landscape constantly faces a myriad of issues regarding data security and information leaks. The right security measures can get highly expensive, and many business owners make the grave mistake of skipping proper security details just to cut costs.
This is such an intense mistake that you might as well hand your data over to malicious third parties. Without proper security measures, data breaches are highly likely to take place, which puts confidential company information along with other intellectual properties at risk.
There are multiple security compliance rules that your business must align with to ensure complete security and discretion of your business data.
Take the help of professional security experts and sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) with your offshore partner to secure your intellectual data.
To Wrap It All Up
While some of the mistakes in offshoring come from not having proper knowledge of the best practices, some of these mistakes come from ignorance as well.
Want to make sure you’re avoiding all the mistakes while offshoring? Partner up with our professional team at Impala Intech, and our consultancy can guide you to take all the right steps to create the perfect offshoring team for your next project.
FAQ
Yes, financial stability ensures the partner can meet its commitments throughout the project.
Include key stakeholders in the decision-making process to align project goals with business objectives.
Yes, ongoing communication is critical for addressing issues, making adjustments, and achieving project success.
Long-term potential should be a consideration to ensure continuity and growth in the partnership.
Yes, speaking with previous clients can provide valuable insights into the partner’s reliability and performance.
