Update Your Checklist, Outsourcing Application Development

By Author: Thresholdsoft
Total Articles: 2
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Since being screwed and blasted many times on conference calls with clients over various deliverables and relative issues, found that on most of the occasions on probing the troubleshooting results, which leads the points the finger to the client and we never dare to question them. Neither an apology nor trivializing such number of small to big instances do not help to improve things or at least do not assure of any repetition again.

This article presents a list of sensible and proactive measures for clients before they outsource any application to any service providing company or a listed vendor. These measures can help both parties (client & Vendor) a lot in saving valuable resources and rescuing such efforts towards creative energies for a business advantage.

1.Provide access to eventual application hosting environment to developer; helps a developer to cut unnecessary efforts during post installation. In allowing for a run time test environment smoothens the transition, as for instance-if a developer has access to information on exact hosting environment, like in .net applications which are built ...
... on Win XP can save on an estimated 25 man hours, when hosted on Win2003 or Vista.

2.Demand for a risk assessment report with various business and non-business issues like branding damage, billing losses, disclosure of sensitive information, legal issues etc against the range of levels it can affect like high, low, Medium, very high, very low, negligible

3.Be completely aware of impact of utilization of third party licensed tools or software and be ensured that the pro-impact assessments do exist in line with your real time specs.

4.Do not outsource application development and Maintenance always for reason of costs, but also to space your IT team with other strategic initiatives, quick turnaround time in countering competitors, steps to improvise processes and practices for key organizational benefits.

5.Demand for a document from vendor about their expertise on the domain knowledge required for the software application development.

6.Graph a Rating scale against the key driving factors to outsource say time, costs, Resource strategic utilization , better expertise,