China Software Outsourcing Company

The Best Offshore Software Outsourcing Vendor----How to Choose

09 Jan, 2010
Written by William Zhu
Beijing RayooTech Co., Ltd.

Nowadays, offshore outsourcing is already a very easy decision to make as the business model of offshore software outsourcing, which has became more and more mature and accepted wildly by people. Various companies and organizations take offshore outsourcing as an effective way to achieve their business goal. Meanwhile, there are thousands of offshore software outsourcing vendors in different levels and located in different countries or districts available for clients. Therefore, clients do not have any trouble in deciding the strategy of offshore software outsourcing, what confused frustrated them mostly is how to choose the best offshore software outsourcing vendor. Sure, you can not over-estimate the importance of choosing vendor and I don’t want to deny the point of view though it sounds a little opinionated: successful offshore software outsourcing depends on your choice of vendor.

Asking how to select a best vendor is like asking how to select a best cloth for yourself. I can only say: the best one is the one suit you best. You might not get a clear standard or criteria even from the boldest experts. Though we are not expert in this field, we still can make some analysis based on our experience to provide some tips or methodologies for you.

Destination

In fact, I don’t want to talk too much about destination although usually it is the first decision to make. Actually, in most of the tenders, clients determine the destination before choosing vendor. In my experience, I rarely saw clients choosing vendors from a list which contain vendors from all over the world. It is not necessary to explain that usually the place which is familiar to clients get more preferences. No doubt, a US company which has many Chinese people working here tends to choose China as offshore software outsourcing destination. The elements should be considered include: language, culture similarity, distance, political and economic situation, etc.

Scale of the vendor

The bigger, the better? No! Not only the price might be higher for a large scale vendor, but also you may not get enough attention when working with big vendor. In addition, the business negotiation may be not so easy when doing business with big vendor. We are not saying that scale is no use. Actually the scale of vendor makes a big difference if you are outsourcing relatively big project. Also, if you don’t want to risk your project by working with a small vendor which has the possibility of going bankruptcy anytime, then consider following points:
1; The reputation of the vendor
2; Employee number and turn over of past several years
3; History
4; Financial situation

Management ability

It is a common to list CMMI5 and ISO27001 as a mandatory condition in RFP nowadays. But is these certificates really so important? Different people hold different views. People who hold opposite idea may think CMMI5 and ISO27001 as useless papers. My opinion is that management matter a lot in offshore software outsourcing. But you need to go deeply to evaluate the real ability of management rather than just take a look at the certificate paper.

Industry background and domain knowledge

If you are outsourcing your total project of building a banking system or telecom system, not just using the engineers from the vendor to coding for you, then pay more attention at industry background and domain knowledge of vendor. For example, if you are building a HIS for your hospital and you don’t have a spec of 1000 pages in hand, it is better that your vendor has previous experience on HIS area.

Infrastructure and Facility

Logistics of offshore software outsourcing. Before making decision, make sure that the office, network, telecom system, conference system can support your project. If possible, pay a visit to the office of vendor and check. But don’t go to the extreme to make decision just because the vendor has a beautiful office.

Technology

Usually, clients outsource the simple part of their developing job to offshore outsourcing vendor. It is still very important to make sure that the vendor has the technology capability to complete the outsourcing job. There are two situations which differ in assessment. The first situation is that you are looking for outsourcing simple job like coding or testing to vendor, and then just get resumes from vendor and interview potential team members to make sure that they are qualified for your requirement. The second one is that you are outsourcing your total project to vendor, and then probably you have to evaluate the comprehensive technology capability of vendor. The following ways or check points may help you evaluate the capability of vendor:
1; Request a proposal for your project to see their understanding and suggestion
2; Ask for detail about their successful case study which is similar with your project
3; Interview with the PM or arrange a presentation to see the qualification of the PM
4; Pilot is very effective, but make sure that pilot project is done by same engineers who are going to take your project.

Project Manager and Core team member

This is an important aspect which may often be omitted. We can put it in this way that a qualified PM means 80% success if your project need less than 5 engineers. So don’t be impatient to neglect a meeting with your potential PM.

Cost

Offshore software outsourcing is all about cost. You may be surprised and remind me of quality, speed to market, special technology, etc. But finally all the things you mentioned could be led to cost. So there is no need to discuss about cost here. Cost is trade-off to all elements we mentioned above.

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