It is challenging for many business owners to find the ideal outsourcing partner that will provide them with the best solutions. Good news! The article will help you to find those.
Outsourcing serves like a magic wand for small businesses and startups in the modern dynamic market. As far as many companies desire to grow with the help of outsourcing, it is essential to decide on an outsourcing partner that will support in receiving the most powerful dividends available. Hiring engineers for startups via outsourcing can be truly reliable, highly financially profitable. Moreover, partnering with world-class engineers with outsourcing can help to speed up the time-to-market phase.
To bring all those bonuses to life, business owners require analyzing several aspects to make a final decision. Aspects that, if ignored will result in extra costs, time loss, and other failures.
While the practice of selecting the relevant outsourcing partner, whether from Ukraine or any other area, is practically similar, but because of the tremendous growth in engineering outsourcing, it gets crucial that you don’t hurry in that.
If they stick to the following best practices, they will find the right outsourcing partner. Let’s start!
Content List
Identify Outsourcing Targets
The wealthiest people from Forbes lists love to say that if they don’t know where they are going, they will never get there. It’s a fact. As soon as you decided to launch an outsourcing project, you should figure out what exactly you desire to outsource. Here, they must evaluate every project stage to understand what skills they don’t possess to get a certain step performed in-house.
To succeed, it is a must to determine short-term as well as long-term requirements, ascertain your vision regarding the project development is clear, what things you will outsource, and establish expectations and responsibilities for your outsourcing partner.
Business owners should be ready to answer questions regarding future solutions from their potential outsourcing partners. Note that the right outsourcing partner will ask you about project targets, attempt to clarify all the requirements before they start the project, and do their utmost to get the project’s nature.
Specify Key Criteria to Conduct Interviews
After the previous step is completed, business owners can start contacting potential outsourcing partners. As far as they shortlist 3-5 contractors, they require to assess them depending on the following:
- Tech expertise and other skillsets;
- Experience in handling challenges;
- Access to advanced technology;
- Sincere passion to make your project successful.
When it comes to conducting interviews with outsourcing companies, consider several “dos”:
- Compose several tech questions to evaluate the candidate’s qualification and experience;
- It is important to ask candidates for their contribution on previous projects: whether they participated in designing the whole solution or several tiny steps;
- Here, elements of case-interview are the option! You should suggest a challenge and get to know how candidates would respond to that. As an alternative, they may ask about cases candidates may have experienced previously, and the strategy that helped them to manage those. You should pay attention to the so-called red flags, for instance, negative commentary on colleagues or management, neglect for clients, and so on.
Don’t Economize on Outsourcing Services
It is a bad strategy to treat outsourcing as a low-price and simple approach to unload the work. The key goal of hiring outsourcing partners is optimizing your project to make room for strategic direction.
The rates of the selected outsourcing partner symbolize their qualifications, experience, and service quality. For example, Contractor A works for 10 US dollars hourly, but their team consists of dozens of junior engineers with limited experience. Contractor B works for 40 US dollars hourly and has only 2 but extremely experienced engineering professionals who require less time to handle things. We hope, it is obvious which option can bring more benefits to business owners.
Write a Detailed Contract
To avoid potential technical, management, or communication risks, the outsourcing agreement must reflect all the project details.
You should compose a contract in the way that it should precisely identify every service level under the shared risk rule. The agreement should reflect a full scope of work in which every party accepts to be responsible for the realization of the indicated tasks.
One more thing should be mentioned here. When they establish a partnership with a certain outsourcing firm, they will have to share confidential data with the outsourcing partner. In case such data is not managed relevantly, the risk appears that the info can be mishandled. So, it is a must that business owners sign a nondisclosure contract with the “final candidate” to be the outsourcing partner before sharing any data.
Inform Your In-house Teams
Before beginning an outsourcing partnership, your small business or startup will have to introduce a set of transformations in organizational and management structure. Outsourcing staff will expand in-house teams (they may even be performing their responsibilities in different time zones). So, business owners should prepare their in-house teams to optimize their collaboration with their new colleagues.
During a meeting, it is a good idea to explain to in-house teams the approaches regarding the fruitful cooperation with the outsourcing partner: figure out communication models, inform (and train) about common tools you will install, and so on.