But if your goal is to
hire a dedicated team of programmers or if the success of your company depends
on the performance of your outsourced programming team then a visit is
recommended. In a previous issue of Runtime, I described a client named Dave who was forced
to outsource and decided to travel to visit offshore software development
vendors. For him it was a critical part of his decision making process which also
took an unexpected turn after his return home.
If you decide to visit
your prospective vendors then what should you look for when you visit?
If you focus on the
first R for Resumes, then on a visit you should actually meet and interview the
team members. More than that, you should also verify that the vendor has a good
recruiting and training process.
After all, it is
unlikely that the vendor will have your complete team on the bench ready to go.
A good vendor will be constantly maintaining a pipeline of good candidates,
pre-screened for technical skill and fit for international assignments.
And after hiring, good
vendors also have a training program that new programmers are required to
complete. It fills in the gaps not covered by university course work and gets
the programmers used to the processes and procedures of the vendor before being
deployed on client projects.
You need to check this
out when you visit. Talk to the recruiters at the vendor and the people
responsible for training new employees.
But in fact recruiting
and training are just one part of the “eSourcing” process.
If you haven’t heard the
eSourcing buzz word before, it means using information technology to enable
delivery of services over the Internet. And it also covers finding and
evaluating vendors that deliver services this way.
The people at the IT
Services Qualification Center (ITSqc) at
Carnegie Mellon University have thought a lot about eSourcing. They created the
eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM-SP) as a framework
for certifying service providers and to help clients evaluate and compare them.
The framework includes 84
practices and five levels of “maturity” in achieving excellence in eSourcing.
This is similar to the five levels of the Capability Maturity Model (CMMi) also
defined at Carnegie Mellon which covers best practices for the software
development process.
The Wikipedia article for eSCM-SP
classifies the eSourcing issues addressed by the framework into these six
themes:
- Good
relationships between the service provider and the client, the end users,
suppliers, and all stakeholders.
- Selecting,
hiring, and retaining a motivated workforce.
- Well
defined and delivered services that satisfy commitments and meet client
needs.
- Managing
common business threats, such as security issues, risk management,
disaster recovery, and statutory and regulatory requirements.
- Providing
world-class services that are always improving.
- Managing service transitions well at both engagement initiation and completion.
The ITSqc folks have
generously published the details of their framework on their website and you
can make use of it to guide your software outsourcing vendor evaluation.
Accelerance is using the eSCM-SP framework as
a guide for our on-site preferred partner assessment process. All Accelerance partners are
hand-selected and undergo a qualification process that documents their strengths
and seeks to uncover weaknesses that impacts the quality of outsourced software
application development. Only those offshore providers who possess the
operations and track record to successfully deliver reliable software
development to clients are selected to become an Accelerance Global Partner.
Other
assessments offered by certification organizations and companies, such as
Microsoft, CMMi and ISO, focus on technical capability. These are certainly
important but don’t tell the full story of what it is like to do business with
a vendor. The Accelerance on-site assessment goes beyond the technical factors
to create a complete picture of every preferred partner for our clients.
Announcement of the first Accelerance preferred partners in Latin America and Eastern Europe will be made shortly. Additional preferred partners are presently being evaluated in India and South America.
Until next time,
Steve Mezak, CEO
Steve@Accelerance.com
Accelerance, Inc.
Risk-Free Outsourcing
+1-877-99-ACCEL
(877-992-2235) x101 Toll-Free
+1-650-472-3785 Global Calls + Fax
Or
contact me at: http://www.Accelerance.com/contact.htm
Author
of the new book -
Software without Borders: A Step-By-Step Guide
to Outsourcing Your Software Development
www.accelerance.com/swb.htm
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