Outsourcing has become a common practice in today’s competitive business world. Many companies are starting to look at business process outsourcing solutions as an easy and simple solution compared to in-housing all the activities in the organization. To boost the growth of the company, it requires strategic partners or experts who can undertake tactical components of their business.
Although outsourcing is adopted in many companies, some others have apprehensions about entrusting their business processes to an external agency. Outsourcing, especially IT outsourcing, is just a common practice of contracting out business operations to a third-party provider that lets you save money and gain a competitive advantage. With an experienced provider to offer the required IT support, businesses can focus on core activities and innovations that will make them stand out among competitors.
Reasons to Outsource
- Outsourcing provides access to a global talent pool. Many tasks can be performed from anywhere in the world. This saves time, recruiting and administrative tasks, as your employees will be managed by an external agency.
- Adding new talent or technology to your company is always an added advantage. It is easier than ever because you can pick up talent for a prototype project or add burst staffing to an existing project.
- Outsourcing saves time and it is cost-effective because the cost associated with running an outsourced project is much less than an in-house team. It eliminates the need for giving salary, health benefits and insurance.
When to Outsource
- Staffing during peak periods: Retail and e-commerce businesses have various functions like packaging, shipping, customer service, payroll processing, HR, etc that are monotonous and time-consuming. These activities can be outsourced to an outside agency and they can be very helpful during peak seasons.
- Project -based staffing: A complete project can be assigned to a third-party vendor and they work autonomously with stakeholders to develop a test plan, gather requirements, code, test features against their test plan and use the code. They provide the end-to-end delivery of a project and can also assist in maintaining the code for that project. This category of staffing is good for projects such as building marketing campaigns, developing a blog, email marketing campaigns, and business website development.
- Burst staffing: Existing projects can be given to the outsourcing partner and they can assist the existing team in completing the project. These projects may include creating static HTML pages, data clean up, documentation, testing JavaScript and CSS cleanup, and so on.
Major Challenges of Outsourcing
- Communication is one of the most significant challenges of outsourcing. So, companies should ensure that effective measures are taken for better communication among team members and the external partners. There are many tools available today like Zoom, GoTo Meeting and Uber Conference that are cost-effective for communicating with remote teams. Ideally, hold a weekly face-to-face meeting with your remote teams.
- Quality assurance of the product is another challenge of outsourcing. For effective processing and a quality product, you should give proper guidelines for quality norms and processes at the beginning of an engagement. Here also, weekly face-to-face meetings would be ideal.
How to Measure Effectiveness of Outsourcing?
There are many ways to measure effectiveness of outsourcing solutions. They are:
- Proper documentation: Project documentation and proper code are important. Use tools like Confluence, Notion and Dropbox Paper to ensure your outsourced team maintains proper code quality.
- Quality of coding: This is an important matrix where you should not compromise with code quality. With tools like Confluence, Notion and Dropbox Paper you can ensure that your outsourced team stays on top of their documentation.
- Bug ratio: This measure lets you determine if a developer understands their tasks clearly and asks questions when they are stuck.
- Task estimation accuracy: This matrix helps you with productivity of a developer and it should help you understand sprint velocity.
Improving productivity in the Long Run
If you are hiring a remote team then make sure that you sign a contract with them and include the metrics you will be tracking in the contract. Outsourcing is not an easy task, it is a complex process that requires careful planning and monitoring. Make sure that you have the time and resources to funnel into its success in the beginning and throughout the process.
Partnering with a trusted and professional provider of business process outsourcing services will help you simplify your business processes and become more efficient. With more time on your hands, you can innovate and improve customer appreciation and satisfaction.
