Following the previous blog on third party failure, I had an email from a friend of mine who has a lot of experience with outsourcing work, some good but more bad. Here are some of his observations:
- Specify up front the experience of the people you want working on the project, particularly if they are working in-house. There have been cases where providers have given us project leaders with no experience in leading a development, and from a group of eight people, six were recently out of university, but we were still paying full price for. I’m not suggesting that recent university graduates aren’t worth employing, but experience is critical and for a software consultancy to send a development team where 75% has very little commercial experience is at best misguided. Having highly paid (if only to the consultancy) external consultants working alongside your team can always cause some friction and resentment, which is made considerably worse if they have limited experience and appear less knowledgeable than the permanent members of staff around them.
- Beware a glossy veneer when using a third party product (as opposed to a bespoke development) as sometimes whilst the functionality you need is there, but the implementation is well below that expected of a professional system. An example would be poorly named database fields, inefficient coding, etc. Unfortunately these problems tend to arise when the product has been chosen and your team is integrating it with your existing systems. The task isn’t impossible, just harder than it should be and may not provide the most efficient solution.
- Multiple vendors can be a nightmare when things go wrong and there isn’t a clear issue or resolution. Lots of finger pointing and arguing and you just want it working.
- Design choices can be influenced by vendors of products you are using trying to sell accompanying products. I have no problem with this, but you make have picked the first product because it was the best available, but that doesn’t mean that the additional product being offered is also the best available. Having said that, we’ve just spoken about how different vendors on a project can cause a problem so it’s not necessarily a straightforward decision.
- It’s important that third parties agree to your company policy, sign non disclosure agreements and stick to them. There’s no point investing money in a competitive advantage and having the consultants take your trade secrets to a competitor.
The Code Whisperer RSS Feed