Don’t Outsource your work, Insource it
Disclaimer: I’m a happy & successful client of the insourcing provider mentioned in the article.
There are several thousands of articles, experiences and companies that have spoken of outsourcing and the mixed bag of benefits and hardships it brings along with it. But for those who are new to this, outsourcing is essentially finding resources at a location away from where your core business or technology teams are, usually to cut spend and scale easily than by hiring more expensive local talent. The flow of work is usually from the more expensive developed countries to more budget friendly developing countries, hence, “outsourcing”.
Large organisations in many industries have scaled and delivered their businesses successfully, especially where technology is not part of their core business using outsourcing strategies.
Meanwhile outsourcing partners facing fierce competition from the fast growing outsourcing service industry, had to build business and billing models that can help them deal with demand from fast growing client base. This translated to aggressive pre-sales pitches, hiring “bench” resources, expansion of office spaces to convince prospective clients they have got everything to cope with their demands in terms of people, technology and logistics.
All this translated to higher price quotes to deal with the overhead of such an extensive tender process with rounds of presentations & negotiations plus setting up the back end operations in advance of committing delivery to the client.
The corporate world though, is not just made of such big players who can afford to wait, find and pay such big outsourcing partners. With the explosion of start ups and small companies which work on very different dynamics like start lean, fail fast and work agile the outsourcing process is neither culturally suitable nor practically viable.
As small and medium businesses (SMB’s) grow and innovate quickly, there is a reciprocal need from outsourcing companies to align with the constraints and culture of these SMB’s to enable them to solve the same problems they solved for larger corporates - scale effectively and profitably.
This is exactly what companies like GyanMatrix Technologies are seeking to address for companies that have been so far wary of even thinking of the idea of outsourcing in spite of budget pressures, low retention rates of local talents, and pressure to quickly innovate and support their core businesses. What GyanMatrix and other service startups in this sector are attempting to do is to enable SMB companies to complement their existing teams and skills with one from the insourcing partner based on business outcomes. The reason they are insourced rather than outsourced is because teams are complemented to deliver your business outcomes rather than finding projects and technical pieces of work that will be shipped elsewhere. It makes a big difference. In the way agile teams and businesses work, the starting point is the outcomes, not the solutions, and finding means to deliver outcomes is a integral part of the delivery and often needs research, building proof of concepts and also an MVP solution to take it to market. You want the engineers to be part of the end to end journey of the product or process you are going to deliver and not just chipping away bits of technical work elsewhere which often tends to result in a product that is less aligned to outcomes as the context is diluted as it flows from the business down to the engineering teams.
Not only that, the individual talents added to your teams are hand picked by you, the client, to ensure your technical and cultural needs match the candidate’s strengths and skills. The candidates are made to feel part of your organisation even before being recruited. This continues over the on-boarding journey, and also in every possible way during the execution of your project eg. your home teams can line manage them directly. There is very less interference from the insourcing company in any of your day to day matters. There are no walls to make things looks OK, control work, people or communications. It is your team and you design and drive it the way you see fit and the way it works for you. Help is offered if you need in establishing the right work culture and iron out any other teething issues.
This has been a highly effective way for teams to collaborate on initiatives that are to be started with short notice and not having to know the exact nature or duration of work as teams can be transitioned or even be working on more than one line of work as “billing” is not based on number of projects, support tickets or tasks done but at an umbrella day rate and allocation of work is entirely up to you in consultation with the combined team. The result is not a long and continuous cycle of work estimations, price quotes, approvals and resource management but a transparent, flexible and efficient process that gives total attention, love and care for the products you build and deliver.
If you are a budding start up or an established small/medium corporate wanting to complement your existing teams with passionate engineers, do get in touch with balu@gyanmatrix.com or reach out to me if you want to discuss more about how we collaborated and executed Insourcing strategy at the company I work for in the UK.
“The only way Out is In”.