Successful companies outsource
In today’s deeply connected world, outsourcing has become the norm across a wide range of industries. When CNN published their list of confirmed American companies sending work overseas, they meant to highlight declining support for home grown American industry; in fact what their list demonstrates is that from small to large, successful companies stay ahead of the competition by utilising every possible advantage and that outsourcing is an advantage that makes a big difference.
The IT sphere is a natural environment for outsourcing
Of course, many more companies use outsourcing than can be found on that list and it’s not only the USA that’s turning outsourcing to it’s advantage. The IT industry in particular is especially well suited to gain from the benefits of outsourcing work and is full of examples of companies that have outsourced their way to success, from communications big hitter Skype through to source code management and collaboration centre GitHub.
How can I create a global success?
In fact, it seems like an established pattern for success: outsource at first to develop your ideas into a marketable product at lower cost, then, once you’ve become an established name, maintain permanent teams and developers at a variety of locations worldwide. Why? Using outsourced teams not only enables such companies to get the best talent for the most reasonable prices, it also ensures that the product has been tested by a variety of different outlooks and is competing not only on the local market, but also globally.
Motivated to provide quality
With such an array of high profile success stories, it’s a wonder even more IT companies don’t choose to outsource their development. What’s stopping them? The examples we’ve already seen demonstrate that there needn’t be concerns over the quality of work. Any new hire is a risk until they’ve proven themselves on the first project, whether full time employee or contracted freelancer. As I’ve written about before, this just means that when you outsource work you should check up on their references and give them some sort of smaller, trial task to begin with to make sure that they can deliver the standard of work that you’re expecting. Freelancers and overseas teams know that they need to both do good work and get good reviews to get the best jobs, which is why motivation to learn more, develop skills and provide the best possible service every time is high.
Language as a testing point
Some companies find themselves hesitant to work with overseas development partners because of the potential for miscommunication due to the language barrier. Again, checking references and simply talking to your potential partner should give a good idea whether this will be a problem or not. Actually, English is so well established as the international language of business that professionally minded outfits everywhere in the world will make sure that they have communicative project managers with very high standards of English. If you find it difficult to communicate with a company’s representative, this is a good sign that you should take another look at the available options. Find a company that has established themselves for the outsourcing market by investing in language skills.
A good partner provides more than just good value
Some of the benefits of outsourcing are obvious: lower costs, only pay for work done (no risk of making a hire and then running out of projects!), and the ability to broaden the number of technologies you can offer your clients work in. Find a quality development partner however, and the benefits can potentially be even greater: those that successfully utilise the many communication tools available can simply feel like an extension of your team, there to help you deal with large projects or busy seasons. A professional overseas team can potentially offer not only developers, but also project management, quality assurance and design skills to either augment your company’s work, or even deal completely with a client, if you don’t have the capacity to do the work in house.
Where should I look?
The only challenge then, is making sure that you find the right company to partner with. Of course here on the ekreative blog I’m going to point out that we have all these qualities and more and are a great option for handling high season overflow for all your app, web and SaaS development needs. But in actual fact we’re just one good option among many; the reason so many high profile companies are turning over big profit margins by using outsourced workforces is in part because there are so many quality outsourcing partners available. Are you using an outsourced team to augment your development work? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.