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How To Prepare Your In-House Development Team For Software Outsourcing

Written by Kanika Gupta | Aug 12, 2021 8:15:00 AM
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With the rapid evolution of today’s software industry embracing the digital revolution, the need for software outsourcing increases. Not all enterprises are equipped and well-financed to manage their business operations efficiently and develop a game-changing software product.

Software outsourcing is a one-stop solution that solves all the business-related problems you are facing in this fast competitive environment. Software outsourcing is a practice where an enterprise or a product company delegates specific tasks to an outsourcing vendor rather than using its in-house resources.

Software outsourcing is a trend now. It’s not going to leave you anytime soon.

So, if you are about to hire a software outsourcing company, it’s the right time that you should start thinking about how you manage both in-house and outsourcing teams.

Hiring a software outsourcing company is hard and collaborating with the outsourcing team is even harder. 

How are they going to react and communicate with them? How is your in-house team going to collaborate with them while working on a single project?

Let’s dive into a few things that your in-house team needs to consider or learn.

Understanding Outsourcing Team's Culture

Be it a startup, small-sized enterprise, or a big MNC, the work culture of every organization is different. It’s profitable to know the culture of your outsourcing team to collaborate well. Learn about their regional work culture, how they strategize and manage processes, and so on.

Understanding their thought process and mindsets gives you an idea of how they handle your project. It ultimately helps you define the right strategies and practices to follow when working simultaneously on a single project to achieve a common goal.

Hence, it will become simpler and more accessible for both teams to communicate and collaborate effectively. It will help reduce the chances of conflict failure between the teams.

Try To Make Communication Seamless With Outsourcing Team

Lack of communication, miscommunication, or misunderstanding does not have any place in outsourcing software development. No process can run smoothly without the collaboration and communication of both in-house and outsourcing teams.

Managers have to work hard to coordinate both teams and encourage them to achieve a common goal. There should be no communication gap between teams during software outsourcing. For this, both of them must rely on the latest tools and technologies. Slack, Trello, Jira, Google Meet, and basecamp are among the most popular platforms today that help enterprises get their processes done fast and effectively.

Read also: Everything Startups Need to Know About Outsourcing Product Development

Provide training to both teams to get mastered in these platforms to manage processes while working in sprints with other teams. It also helps you lessen down your workload. And help each team member to know each other capabilities and efficiency. Use tools like Jira to get simplified project management. It comes up with planning and analytical features that allow you to set goals and track their progress.

Moreover, try to make your in-house team use the most straightforward language that outsourced professionals can easily understand. Be simple, clear, and transparent in what you communicate.

Implementing Agile Is The Best Way Out

The software development process needs your utmost interaction and iteration while developing a digital product.

For this, most enterprises today adopted an agile methodology that led to the collaboration of in-house and outsourcing teams, resulting in a significant increase in inefficiency.

The adoption of agile methodology helps enterprises in the development and delivery of a high-quality software product faster.

Agile development is the fragmentation of a complex project into iteration, phases, or sprints.

The length of the sprint may vary from project to project. It depends on the complexity of the process, the technology used, and the team required.

Both the teams in-house and outsourcing teams work simultaneously in different sprints to achieve a common goal.

The adoption rate of agile methodology is growing continuously year after year.

Read also: How To Choose The Perfect Software Outsourcing Partner In India In 2021?

Make Them Learn To Balance The Time Difference

Managing time zones is a big challenge while working with Outsourcing teams.  The development teams working on a single project in different sprints and time zones have to collaborate to avoid miscommunication. Make use of overlapping hours to mitigate this challenge. It is the time duration when both in-house and outsourcing teams are working simultaneously.

Consider an example where you have outsourced to India; the shift end time in India may overlap the shift start time in the USA.

It’s the prime responsibility of the in-house teams to discuss working time with outsourcing teams, check their availability and suitable time. Make sure you should swap time in case of any collision.

In the end, eliminating time zone differences benefits businesses with continuous and higher productivity. It will lead to ongoing software development without any hindrances, like when your team in the US is sleeping and the other team in India is working.

Treat Your Outsourcing Team As A Partner

To make your performance better and, productive in-house teams should start considering their outsourcing teams as their working partner. When you start thinking about your outsourcing team and treat them as your partner, the team will work harder for you. Also, it contributes more effort to achieve a common goal. In-house teams should ask them their work style, schedule, work strategy, and so on. 

The teams should understand each other's respective responsibilities and work patterns to collaborate better. The in-house team should consider them as their long-term business partner to build a healthy relationship. You should also acknowledge the hard work they put in to accomplish your project. Spend your quality time to know the team members better and build a rapport with them.

It will help solidify your relationship with the team and build a healthy working business environment.

Concluding Lines

I believe your in-house software development team must have understood how they should work with outsourcing teams. They prove to be beneficial for your business. When you work with your outsourcing team in the right way, your outsourced business is bound to succeed.

As both teams will work together, your outsourced team will be able to understand your project-specific language that will make a huge difference. They should start making organizational strategies from the very start. Connecting with an outsourcing team can become a catalyst for bringing positive changes to your enterprise.