Simple and Proven Ways to Alleviate Risks of Offshoring
Businesses all over the globe are turning toward outsourcing their projects to offshore development companies, perhaps due to the benefits that follow while offshoring. The primary reason as stated by these businesses was to focus on increasing productivity and efficiency that comes easily with offshoring while reducing the in-house development costs in a competitive economy. However, there are also several risks involved with offshore development that might pose a threat to your organization which certainly need attention.

It is necessary to analyze the associated benefits and threats before you think of hiring any company, whether locally or overseas, for your project development. That makes it easy to eliminate the jeopardies at the preliminary phases, leading to a long-term and reliable outsourcing partnership. Here’s a list of risks that have been identified in recent years, and the practices involved to mitigate these risks to let your organization earn maximum benefits of offshoring.
Misinterpretation of Requirements
Drawing clear and apposite requirements to your outsourcing partner form the foundation of your project development which also predicts the scale of success of your project. You might have come across developers and managers complaining about the bad quality code they received by outsourcing which made it difficult to comprehend. This occurs generally when the functional requirements of the project are not defined well to the development team. Hence, the developers often tend to build ineffective code either due to the ambiguity in requirements or the falling deadline and constant spurring by managers to build the project on the fly.
Steps to reduce this risk-
- Gather user requirements that describe the number of users the software will support, efficiency and speed of operations, and the functionality of the software.
- Analyze system requirements that would determine the likeliness of the proposed system to be accepted, implemented and tested.
- Inspect the stated requirements of the proposed system to identify glitches and errors to avoid discrepancies and ambiguities, and mention how these issues will be handled.
Quality Assurance
No software application is free of bugs even if it is developed by the best development team. A major risk in dealing with unknown offshore vendors is if they implement the standard procedures for Quality Analysis (QA). Therefore, QA is important to track down the bugs to assure superior quality and working of the system. A few reasons that QA isn’t done sufficiently incorporate the lack of own QA/Testing team, faulty QA due to a strict deadline, and vague understanding of requirements.
Steps to reduce this risk-
- Check if the QA team has a testing plan that covers system regression, user testing, and load & volume testing for your software..
- Design test cases based on system requirements.
- Examine if functionality, scalability, and security issues have been addressed.
- Evaluate the vendor’s QA processes, standards, and documentation.
- Carefully test your software before gushing into its release for public use.
Communication Barriers
Communication poses a barrier while establishing and maintaining relationships with outsourcing vendors, especially when the vendors belong to another country. Communication can be a concern if the vendors are not fluent in the English language, there are issues with time differences, and the cultural differences vary widely.
Steps to reduce this risk-
- Select a vendor if it has sufficient staff that can manage relationship and project along with fluency in English and strong commitment.
- An effective communication plan must be established which should include regular staff meetings, weekly project status report, and Ad hoc communications through phone, chat or email.
- Hold review sessions regularly with project managers either through online conferencing or VoIP.
- Record key points of the meeting and distribute them to all the team members later.
- Keep all the discussions open and frequent to jointly discover the issues and address them.
Closing
Offshore development brings significant benefits that include better productivity and reduced costs. But at the same time, you should keep a plan ready to tackle the associated risks that would come along as a part of outsourcing your project. Careful planning and consistent evaluation of the project and vendors can help you gain maximized benefits and returns.
