5 CRITERION FOR CHOOSING A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT COMPANY IN 2021 AND BEYOND
Picking the right offshore software development center is a problematic process. You will go through a nail-biting doings of appraisal and consideration. Once you go onboard this risky voyage, you will need to identify transparent selection criteria to escape the risk of repetitive vendor searching.
If you don’t want it sooner or later to fail to meet your expectancies in terms of quality, professional management, culture matched, you need to lay down specific benchmarks for selecting an offshore software center from inception. In this post, we walk around the top 5 reasons that you should judge for the duration of the selection process of a software development outsourcing company.
1. Communication
When your company needs a trusted offshore software center to develop your project, one of the first criteria you would consider are the company size, engagement models, expertise, etc. Barely do they determine communication as the mostimportant factor? Here Sosene will bring this benchmark to the pole position to highlight its output to the whole project success.
Unproductive communication may involve many aspects including deficient English proficiency, the lack of emotional intelligence, cultural differences, etc. But let’s manage it from a different angle focusing more on comprehending the client’s business needs. Go for those vendors who tinker with setting up extra calls with you and sending follow-ups showing the sincere interest in your business. The enthusiasm of a vendor to clarify with you all the fine distinctions ensures the comfort of your further cooperation with them. It assures the success of your partnership in the long-term.
2. Effective project management
In the (PMI)’s Pulse of the Profession 2020 survey, organizational agility (35%), choosing the right technologies to invest in (32%), and securing relevant skills (31%) were the top three factors identified by executive leaders as the most important keys to business success. These three factors form a strong fundamental for effective project management.
Sosene’s Management Team will establish a clear path for the project of software development and track every step and setback along the way. Still, it’s important to realize when plans should be reconsidered and workflows adjusted. Every successful project involves compromise and revisions from the original plan. Knowing how to manage a project from start to finish is an essential skill, and knowing how to deal with obstacles along the way is just as important.
It may be a good idea to alter some of the milestones you started with. A certain amount of flexibility allows employees to show off their inspiration and creativity when they have a great idea. The key is to know when to let workers experiment and when to rein them in, based on the principles of effective project management. Each project starts off with a set scope, timeline, and budget, and it can become a major problem when the team creeps beyond the project’s scope.
Managing teams effectively turns an organization’s targets into reality. Getting there requires careful attention to a tremendous number of different factors and adapting to conditions that never sit still. When leaders have a strong awareness of what needs to be done and a clear view into how team members are playing their roles, they have a far better chance at success.
My company have applied agile methodology is that a very popular project management methodology today. It is very flexible, with an emphasis on self-organisation and teamwork. Agile methodology is based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising and cross-functional teams. The team members get to know each other through the continuous exchange of ownership, and take ownership of the delivery of each deliverable.
3. Pricing model
Pricing is not the first decisive factor you should look at, but it plays an important role in the decision-making process. Nobody wants to use the low-priced service, but rather the most cost-effective. Don’t play ducks and drakes with yourmoney, you should clearly understand the SOW of your project and your final goal. The budget is ascertained by the engagement model you want.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to engage a full-time IT architect or a UX designer if you need their services only during a specific time period within a project. On the other hand, it is not reasonable to hire developers or QA specialists an hourly rate if they are going to be fully involved in the project and will work 8 hours per day in a workweek (IT Staff Augmentation service). Hourly rates are much higher than the monthly rates of dedicated engineers, so the Time and Materials (T&M) contract is not the best option for a long-term partnership.
As for the Fixed Price model, it works well for firms that have a comprehensive vision of the product and lucidly identified requirements. A OSDC model with dedicated development team, by contrast, is an best possible choice for long-term projects with changing requirements. You should take a team of software development professionals entirely focused on your project, define their workload, and have overall control over the process of software development. Moreover, it is highly elastic and fully adjustable to any changes. From our experience, we can declare that the dedicated development team service take the lead to the most workable results.
4. Expertise
You go to great lengths to find an offshore software development center that specializes specifically in certain industries and technology stacks. Let’s know, you are considering to extend your in-house team with Java/Python/React/Vue/Mobiledevelopers who work with microservices. You would first judge those vendors who could offer you with variety of expertises and immediate staffing regardless of all the different criteria. So when you are searching for a specific skillset, you should narrow down those vendors who have a proven track record of working in that area.
On the other hand, leveraging the knowledge of your offshore software partner is more cost-effective than growing all these expertises in-house. Even though today your company doesn’t rely on such innovative technologies as Frontend (AngularJS, ReactJS, VueJS, etc.), Backend (NodeJS, Java, RoRs, etc.), XR (AR/VR), Blockchain, AI, in the future you may need them. So elect a mature vendor with diverse tech expertise at the inception so that you will be able to tap into it when needed.
5. Experience
Before kicking off an offshore software center with a specific vendor, ensure the company has hands-on experience in related projects in your industry. Those who develop fintech solutions and specialize in insurtech, crowdfunding, P2P lending, ecommerce, digital banking can not be equally good at automotive software development services.
The same is true of managing extensive projects with several distributed teams. A company that has no forgoing experience working with remote teams would find it challenging to establish effective cross-team collaboration both at the technical and organizational levels. With remote working, you can take our best talents from around the world to work for your company. You can hire our staff without having to worry about relocation costs. Many companies are beginning popularize remote working practices. These companies include Appen, Upwork, 37Signals, and many others. This is because it allows them to hire more people thereby reducing costs.
Firstly, it may be difficult to ensure technology alignment as distributed teams must share the same coding practices and constantly exchange knowledge within the project. Secondly, maintaining healthy communication may pose a challenge. So the software development company should have experience in working with other vendors and remote teams using various communication channels and tools, such as Slack, Confluence, Jira, etc.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
No one ever works with a software development outsourcing company without doing comprehensive research on the company, its services, portfolio, and references. Little attention, however, companies pay to such criteria as communication, culture, agility, and employer brand, which are decisive in building a successful partnership. By putting all these problems together, you will receive a in depth yet concise overview of a vendor. This will help you pick out a trustworthy vendor and start the ball rolling in the right route. Our experienced team will supply you with expertises and tools to make your business be successful.
At Sosene, we build dedicated, full-time outsourced teams for our customers across the world. With over 8 years of market experience, we have delivered our software development outsourcing services to several industry leaders as well as innovative start-ups across a variety of industries. Should you need any help with outsourcing software development, don’t hesitate to talk to our talented developers.
