Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Statistics show that Outsourced Projects fail at a higher rate...
Even though outsourced projects fail at a higher rate than projects done internally, that doesn't mean that one should stop outsourcing for this reason alone. After all, delivery of high quality working software isn't important, otherwise you wouldn't have outsourced in the first place...
Have you ever attempted to get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month? Have you came to realize that more people to a late project makes it later? Outsourcing in 99.9% of the situations requires adding more people which factorial's increases the amount of communication required to make a project successful. If you want to make outsourcing a success, it is vital that you ask your Indian outsourcing partners to reduce the amount of resources assigned to a project.
Many IT projects have way too many heads. Usually when you buy into CMMi and other heavyweight approaches, you are also buying into literally hundreds of people involved. Executives want to change the world and teams of developers, business analysts, testers, architects, business users, etc. set out to do just that. Ever notice that none of them seem to deploy on time or budget? The subdivision antipattern usually kicks in where folks who are delusional believe they can subdivide the project into parts, and have smaller teams own the parts. Unfortunately, this is almost never well managed.
Eliminate the communications funnel that exists by putting a liaison resource in the middle and demand direct communication with all involved. Don't think about tools to do version control, automated builds, etc before you think of tools that enable communication better. Consider establishing a Wiki where onsite and offshore folks can collectively participate, ask questions of each other and otherwise interact...
| | View blog reactionsHave you ever attempted to get nine women in a room to make a baby in one month? Have you came to realize that more people to a late project makes it later? Outsourcing in 99.9% of the situations requires adding more people which factorial's increases the amount of communication required to make a project successful. If you want to make outsourcing a success, it is vital that you ask your Indian outsourcing partners to reduce the amount of resources assigned to a project.
Many IT projects have way too many heads. Usually when you buy into CMMi and other heavyweight approaches, you are also buying into literally hundreds of people involved. Executives want to change the world and teams of developers, business analysts, testers, architects, business users, etc. set out to do just that. Ever notice that none of them seem to deploy on time or budget? The subdivision antipattern usually kicks in where folks who are delusional believe they can subdivide the project into parts, and have smaller teams own the parts. Unfortunately, this is almost never well managed.
Eliminate the communications funnel that exists by putting a liaison resource in the middle and demand direct communication with all involved. Don't think about tools to do version control, automated builds, etc before you think of tools that enable communication better. Consider establishing a Wiki where onsite and offshore folks can collectively participate, ask questions of each other and otherwise interact...
