What to keep In-house and what to Offshore?

Do you have a compelling product idea? Want to build a new product? Are you new to the outsourcing industry? And would like to understand what you should keep in-house and what you should offshore?

There is a very important need to be educated with truthful knowledge about offshoring rather than just eavesdropping rumours about how bad could offshoring be for your business. Here is a quick sneak peek about what steps you should perform before thinking of you require or you don’t require to offshore software development.

Let’s put a table under the headings “Skills”, “Capacity” and “Budget” which might help you understand and decide:

Assessment for what to keep in-house and what to offshore

Steps while planning what you should keep in-house and what offshore

Thoroughly evaluate your business, finding the right and precise vision. Segregate what functions are performed that are strategic or have a direct security-related effect. May include research and development, unique core competencies.

Based on the main goal of the company search out those tasks that can be carried out outside the company also at a rather affordably cheaper rate. May include backend development activities, usability engineering, maintenance and testing and QA.

After having searched those categorized tasks, determines to what extent i.e. part or whole would you like to bake out offshoring. Also details of what amount of control do you need on those tasks.

Based on this chalk out a line-up of all the potential vendors. If you feel you cannot find them yourself, it is always good to look up to your business advisors or close associates, fellow companions or even your clientele.

The factors that you should consider while cherry-picking your vendors is the model they comfortable to use, how long and to what magnitude do the vendor have experience in that field, goodwill in the market and also the availability of enough bandwidth of resources that match up the International standards.

Last but not the least what cost would the vendor quote and what you think is suitable for the task almost equate to the satisfactory range. After all, if the task is going to cost a blast even by outsourcing then it would be like I am ready to shut my business down.

So if you follow these steps the things fall easily into two categories “Responsibilities” and “Tasks”. I have used five main important pointers to check out the criticality of the business that the project creates on the company. Have a look

Do you know about the background, methodology and combination of technologies needed to successfully execute the project?

Is there a specific time to market that you have to adhere to? For example, do you have to launch your product before Christmas or start of the school year?

Is this project going to lead to one of the crown jewels of your company, how the core is it going to be to for your company’s business goals?

Based on these pointers I have bifurcated prominent areas that might fall under “Responsibility” which you might want to keep in-house

I.           Research and Development

II.          Modules which involves IP and security issues (patented formulae, algorithm etc.)

And the areas that might fall under “Tasks” which you might want to outsource to an offshore software development company with no restrictions would be

I.           Back-End modules

II.          UI/Visual Designing

III.         Usability Engineering

IV.         Performance Engineering

V.          Product/Application Porting

VI.        Testing and QA

VII.       Maintenance

In-house or offshore development India finally rests on the amount of significance it can bring by either making it at home or send it overseas. Today one can even outsource end to end or part of the project with seamless integration to offshore software development services and still be very satisfied and at a profitable end. The fact lies in what kind of business relation you are able to evolve with the outsourcing company and the kind of commitment it is making to your project.

In the end, your project, be it small or big is just like your child, you know it well what is best for it and what isn’t, right?