Several times a week I’m contacted by offshore software development teams looking to partner with us. I’m always interested in these relationships as, with the right management, they can reduce project cost and duration normally at the expense of increased risk. Invariably I’m persuaded by their agent that their team in (normally) Mumbai have better educated, harder-working and cheaper developers than I could ever hope to find in the UK.
Before setting up Everthere, I’d been involved with my fair share of offshoring projects. For each project, I couldn’t have asked for the outsourced team to be better educated, harder-working or indeed represent any better value. Despite this, sometimes these projects were plagued with near-fatal problems. How could this be?
Put simply: education, dedication and renumeration are not the only capabilities you need to look for in your outsourced software development team. What’s far more relevant are their capabilities in communication and creativity. When you’re working thousands of miles away from your client, I’m convinced that these are the competencies that will bring the project in successfully.