By Steve Mezak

Outsourcing your software development can save you time and money if you know what you need. Too often US companies attempt to outsource without a good understanding of what their software should do, and this is the biggest cause of outsourcing failure. It is unreasonable to expect your outsourcing team to have a menu of software, pre-prepared, so you can just select the items you want.

Ever go to a restaurant with a picky eater? They tell the waiter in excruciating detail how they want their food prepared. And heaven forbid that the food arrives different from what was requested! Back to the kitchen it goes to be “fixed” to make the picky eater happy.

Sometimes US companies hire an outsourced partner as if they were going to a restaurant. They select the cuisine based on the flavor of the technology they require. Chinese .NET or Indian Java? How about some Russian C++? Unfortunately there is rarely a menu for the exact items you might like to order from an outsourced team.

Are you approaching outsourcing your software like you are walking into a restaurant? Are you expecting the outsourcing team to advise you, like an attentive waiter, on the way your software should look, be prepared and presented to your customers?

Instead, bring your own recipe when you start work with an outsourcing team. Unlike your dining experiences, you cannot ask for the daily special. You have to provide a specific description of what you would like to have, and how it should be prepared. Without such a recipe, your outsourced software development efforts can be starved for success.

Poorly specified software is often the result when “subject matter experts” are involved. Subject matter experts, or SMEs, know a lot about a particular subject, like IC design, business process workflow, inventory management, etc., but very little about designing software. SMEs can struggle to get their ideas encoded in the software. They need to work with someone that knows the best way to design and develop software.

Sometimes, there is a fear of getting bogged down in the details. Since some software executives are great with people, they feel much more comfortable hiring a person to handle the details. They know how to manage a person here, better than they can manage an offshore team of programmers in a remote offshore location.

One Accelerance client is in this situation. The CEO wants to outsource the development of a new software product. But there is no specification. In this case Accelerance is acting as a virtual CTO, responsible for the design, and development of the client’s software.

The client is essentially saying, “Design the software for me, and I’ll tell you if it matches what I am thinking.” This can work because the cost of outsourcing is so low that rework and multiple design iterations are affordable.

This type of arrangement only works when paying on a Time and Materials basis. There is no way to offer fixed pricing because the end product is not defined.

Of course, not having a specification may not stop you from asking for a fixed price bid! In this case, you can outsource the creation of a specification that defines your software for a fixed price. Then the resulting complete design specification is used to create a second fixed price bid for writing your software.

Another factor comes into play when you pay a fixed price amount for a software design specification. You usually have to pay at least half up front. This is to protect the outsourcing company from delivering a specification for creating the software and then not getting paid.

Because software design often occurs at the beginning of a relationship, both parties seek to minimize their risk. You minimize your risk by selecting an outsourcing team with a proven track record and great references. The outsourcing team reduces their risk by getting partial (sometimes full) payment before starting.

There are multiple deliverables that should be produced during the design phase of creating your software, whether you do it yourself, or outsource the design:

• Marketing Requirements
• Storyboard Demo
• Functional Specification
• Multiple Release Milestone Schedule
• Detailed Task Schedule for First Release
• Detailed Design Specification (optional)

Unfortunately, software development has not progressed to the point where ready-made modules are available to order and combined to create your software. There is not yet a menu of choices available to anyone that is hungry for new software. Instead, you must provide your own recipe for what you need. The good news is low cost outsourced software design and development resources are now available to create your custom software to meet your exact specifications.

About the Author: Steve Mezak is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and international outsourcing expert. Get your copy of his free report now on “The Seven Deadly Dangers of Outsourcing Your Software Development” by visiting http://www.Accelerance.com

Source: www.isnare.com

No related posts.

By Mikhail Zavileysky

Overall Project Cost = Price per Hour x Hours for the Project

The first thing you should remember is that the cost of a project is comprised of two components – price per hour and the number of hours required for the project. This principle may seem obvious, but it is too often forgotten. It’s common practice to first choose vendors with the lowest price and only then ask how many hours will be needed for completion of a particular project. With this strategy, you may miss vendors who might charge more, yet who work faster and more efficiently, thus reducing the total cost of the project..

Project Budget

It is a good idea to decide right away how much you are ready to spend on a project. Our practice shows that you can find a better vendor and significantly reduce risks by disclosing the allotted budget to the vendor. This information allows the vendor to better estimate the project and determine what can/can’t be done for the specified sum of money.

If both the goal and the price are known, the project can be implemented more efficiently with reduced risks and higher ROI.

Simplicity – Nothing Redundant

You should ask you potential vendor for their vision of the basic structure of your system. If the vendor proposes something very sophisticated, make sure it is absolutely necessary. Some vendors tend to complicate the system trying to foresee possible additions and improvements later on, new versions etc. With this approach, you are actually forced to pay for something you may never need. This also greatly increases the risks, as the system become more complex, which might lead to additional difficulties. We do our best to fulfill your exact requirements most efficiently, which results in creation of more stable and reliable systems.

Using Home Developed Tools and Components

Some vendors may offer faster project implementation than others. One of the reasons can be the existence of their own custom made tools, libraries, products, which may facilitate the creation of your system. The time and money savings advantage is evident. However, there is one serious hidden drawback in this practice and it lies in the system maintenance. You may experience serious problems when you hire another vendor to improve and support the system built by the previous vendor. For the new team, it is inevitably difficult to understand the structure of the system if it was developed with the use of non-standard means. Maintenance becomes much more troublesome and expensive. However, this practice can be used successfully in a few cases.

First, it can be safely used if there is a good long-term relationship with your vendor and you are sure he will continue to maintain your system after initial deployment. Second, all the tools and components were created according to common standards. In this case the use of the existing code can be very effective. DataArt uses only standard products and development tools and has a vast collection of reusable code that conforms to the common coding style and can be used to facilitate future development. This makes the system easily maintainable by any developer.

Documentation and Coding Style

In the majority of cases, the systems will inevitably require additional support, tuning or improvements and documentation plays a very important role. Very often, the software requirements are outlined at the early stages of the project. Yet the system inevitably changes in the course of the development, and not everything goes according to the original plan. The documents, however, remain the same, which results in the inconsistency between the system and its documentation at the completion of the project. This leads to many additional problems, especially in the system maintenance or improvement as nobody can determine if the system is flawed or the documentation is wrong.

DataArt always provides the systems it developed with up-to-date documentation, which reflects the system’s contents. What’s more, we use a standard clear and easily understandable coding style, which includes extensive comments allowing for better understanding of how the system works even if the documentation is lacking for some reason.

Why Faster is Usually Better than Cheaper

There are several reasons for choosing a slightly more expensive, yet faster vendor, over a slower and cheaper one. First, you save time by choosing the faster vendor. Second, a change of a vendor’s team working for you is less probable if it works a shorter period of time. This means lower risks and less time spent on communication and control. Last but not least, companies that charge more are willing to share the risks, while cheaper and smaller ones rarely take any kind of risk at all.

Knowledge Transfer

Apart from the actual development much time is taken by the knowledge transfer. This procedure is of utmost importance, as its efficiency and success influence all other processes. With better knowledge transfer, there is better overall development. Proper understanding of a client’s requirements will help a vendor to avoid many mistakes and perform the development much faster.

The knowledge transfer mostly depends on a project coordinator on the vendor’s side, which makes his role utterly important. One very simple but essential idea is to have the same person coordinating the project from start to completion. This helps the vendor to get a better vision of the client’s project, without loosing any details, however minor they might be. The latter happens quite often when a new project coordinator is assigned in the middle of the project. This is especially important for information not mentioned in the specifications or other documents. The client is often falsely safe in knowing that all the necessary information was conveyed to the vendor, while one of the vendor’s coordinators failed to properly convey a piece of essential information to another. This can have serious implications on the client/vendor communication and cause problems, as issues obvious for the client may be quite surprising to the vendor, especially if some information was lost. DataArt is well aware of this possibility and we change the coordinator only when it is absolutely necessary and useful for the client’s project. This saves a lot of time, efforts, and significantly reduces the risks.

Project Tracking and Review

Another important item for consideration is project tracking. It’s essential that a client can observe the flow of the project development and have the latest information at hand. A client must be able to reach a vendor at any time. All of DataArt staff is available by E-Mail, phone, ICQ, MSN, Skype – which creates the effect of a continuous presence, a comfortable white noise. With DataArt, clients are never alone with their technical and organizational problems.

Team

You should ask your potential vendor about a team they plan to provide for a project. Our practice shows that the most efficient teams consist of five to 10 people (depending on the size of the project). If the project is truly grand, there should be several teams five to 10 people. Using a greater number seriously reduces the speed and quality of the teamwork.

We also suggest having a core team employed in the project full time. This saves a significant amount of time spent on knowledge transfer and raises the involvement of team members in the project. At DataArt, core teams are a common practice. Since our team members can perform a variety of tasks (i.e. developers can be easily employed as testers) no time is ever wasted on idle tasks.

About the Author: Mikhail Zavileysky has been Chief Operations Officer of DataArt’s St. Petersburg’s office since the company’s inception in 1997. Under his direction, DataArt acquired its driving force – an outstanding team of managers and software developers. Visit http://www.dataart.com

Source: www.isnare.com

No related posts.

By Steve Mezak

Many executives and investors are skeptical that software products can be developed using outsourcing. Even more skepticism is expressed at the idea of outsourcing version 1.0 of a product. Yet Accelerance clients are using outsourcing to create their products right now. What is the secret to using outsourcing to successfully develop a software product?

Many people believe outsourcing is useless when you are in the Fuzzy Front End – that fuzzy zone between when a market opportunity is known and when serious software development can begin. They think you need to slog through the Fuzzy Front End by coding a prototype of your product. If so, you need the development team here, not several oceans away.

Another false assumption is that you need to write a comprehensive specification for your software during the Fuzzy Front End. Many companies use a very formal product definition process, optimized to remove as much “fuzz” as possible. How long should it take to design a software product before development can begin?

Obviously time is of the essence when developing a new product, but before the development process can begin you must have some idea of what your software will do. It is best to find this out from your prospective customers. But how can you involve your customers early and often in a collaborative process, when both of you are not sure of what they need or want? And what does that have to do with outsourcing?

According to Steve Blank, founder of several software startups and now lecturer at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, you don’t need a product development process. You need a customer development process. You need a process to discover what ornery problem your potential customers have that will cause them to part with their hard-earned money to solve that problem by buying your software.

The first step of Blank’s customer development process is Customer Discovery. Here are his steps of customer discovery:

• Create a product (or product demo)
• Meet with customers and answer these four questions of customer discovery:

1. Have you identified a problem customers want to solve?
2. Does your product solve these customer needs?
3. If so, do you have a viable and profitable business model?
4. Have you learned enough to go out and sell?

• Change your product to reflect what you learn
• Iterate until all questions can be answered positively

Is there a way to shorten these iteration cycles? The Accelerance answer is, don’t code up your product or prototype at the start. Use an HTML editor to create screen mock-ups. Then link them together to tell the “user stories” of your software product. They show the major use cases of your product. Demonstrating the use cases this way is like putting your product requirements in motion. It simulates how the real product will be used.

HTML is easy to edit and requires no programming. You can make quick iterations before committing your product ideas to code.

Here is the five-step Accelerance formula you can follow to successfully design your product:

1. Describe your product idea and its benefits.
2. Create a demo of the major use cases showing the biggest benefits of your software.
3. Perform the Customer Discovery steps described above, iterating until you & customers are satisfied.
4. Write an MRD using screen shots from your demo as illustrations.
5. Develop and test your software.

In modern business, you should focus on your core competency and outsource the rest. In the Accelerance five-step process, the first 4 steps of defining your product idea, completing the customer discovery process and documenting the requirements must be part of your core competency. The last step is not.

Anybody can develop software. But only you can figure out what your customers will buy. And that makes your software development a non-core process. Use this five step formula to take advantage of low cost outsourcing as an effective way to get your product developed quickly.

About the Author: Steve Mezak is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and international outsourcing expert. Get your copy of his free report now on “The Seven Deadly Dangers of Outsourcing Your Software Development” by visiting http://www.Accelerance.com

Source: www.isnare.com

Related posts:

• How To Use a Product Review

If you elected to build a website, you know there is never a shortage of things to do.  So how do you get them all done?  Getting help seems to be a logical conclusion but it usually boils down to the dreaded bottom line … money.  Money is more or less the item that gets in the way of most peoples success.  You don’t want to spend the money because you figure you can do it yourself.  You have to take an excessive amount of time to learn what you need and end up hurting your site because you are taking longer than expected.  Spending money on some key items is not only smart but it will help you in the long run.

Duh …

Anything you outsource or pay someone to do is a tax deductible expense that will benefit you at tax time.  I always say that I really benefit from all my concepts and strategies at the end of the year.  It kind of gives Christmas a new meaning (not to take away from God!)  But spending money on talent can be one of your best investments if you think of it as just that … an investment.

Examples

A great example of outsourcing is getting some help with the SEO or your website.  If you said to your self what is SEO, then you really need help.  SEO stands for search engine optimization and can be a full time job when it comes to your website.  If you have a large website you have to make sure that each page is optimized so that Google can find it and index it.  Google ranks web pages not sites, so each page has its own marketing code that you have to develop to get people to come to your page.

Link Building

Links are very important in the Google formula for ranking.  Finding someone who understands that is very important as well.  Creating a link building program needs to be a smart part of your advertising budget.  If you want to become an authority on your subject matter you will need a good supply of one way direct links to your site and select pages in your site.  This takes planning, man hours, dedication and brainstorming.  This is extremely important if you plan on ranking for any particular keywords.

Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants are all the rage today because people can accomplish more by having people working for them but not necessarily being in the same office space as you are.  Microsoft knows how important this concept is
that they are not incorporating the whole virtual assistant concept into their
professional software.

The Key

The key to all this is to really sit down and do some planning in regards to outsourcing.  Face the fact that if you want to be successful, you need to surround yourself with people that have more talent than you.  If you embrace this fact, the sky is the limit.

No related posts.