Outsource projects failure? Deep insight from experiences to make outsourcing successful for your next project

Outsourcing? Not so interesting anymore. I have been burnt many times and therefore I don't suggest my business partners and friends to go ahead and hire offshore project development team. Do you share the same thought everytime, if anyone asks you about reliable development business partner or offshore development team?

I quite understand the reasons behind the thought?

I have been working in IT industry for last 10 years and gone through different steps of offshore/outsource project development life cycle. My experience comes directly from leaf workers to management team, and might be that's why I may put insights or different reasons why any outsource project fails at first. There might be many other reasons and I am only going to put forward those insights that have been experienced by me. On the opposite note, if you follow certain rules then you can get your next outsource project successfully delivered without having any issue. 

Hiring unreliable offshore development team

Ask yourself how you hired your last offshore development team? You might have used different freelancing platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, Guru and similar sites. If I am not wrong then they were used to be very good sourcing sites for reliable team, but somehow they lost their track. You can find many freelancers and small businesses on these sites whose main purpose is to earn money rather providing values to their clients. They send proposal to lots of different projects without having solid understanding of project work scope. Sometimes, they further subcontract project to another small team making very difficult to share right knowledge and project scope.

If main purpose of any development team is to mere generate revenue, then I don't think they care enough about their clients and projects. You must better cross examine your prospective development team and see if they are subcontrating the work or developing at their own. I will be making sure to share more insight as how you can find reliable development partner in different thread. 

The first step of successful outsource project is to get reliable offshore development team. Trust me, if you can get reliable team, then you can free yourself and sit calmly to have hot cup of coffee. And later start working on business development.

Communication gap throughout the project development life cycle

The second missing part of puzzle is communication. Lots of time, you might have faced communication issues with your development team. You had to make extra efforts to make sure, your team was getting correct vision of your project. Think about it, you are asking certain features integrated in project, and your team is not able to properly comprehencing the significant portion of your features. What will you do? The frustration creeps on and on. 

Make sure, your development team is able to understand or share your project vision. Also note, the communication doesn't mean speaking or writting correctly, it means sharing communication through UI design, development work, artifacts, even at coding level. Did you try to read your development team code? Having experienced in lots of coding and languages, sometime I don't understand the context of code. 

Suggest your development team the mode of communication, standards and any other things that help both of you to share project vision. The more garbage vision development team have, changes are more of having unsuccessful project.

Lack of technical expertise 

The third most reason for outsource project failure is lack of development team technical expertise. Now a days, I am seeing many freelancers having one year or two years of industry experience and starting their own development team. They don't have enough knowledge to even completing one project and they are sending proposal for complete website and mobile application development. 

On the other note, I am also seeing the similar trend in owner. They don't understand the team expertise and decide the team solely based on price. I don't understand why owner think they can get expertise in cheap price. The saying goes, "You get what you pay". Don't make your decision solely based on price, understand the team expertise, what kind of projects they have done so far, how many clients they have handled and so on. Also sometime, the experienced team may not show the best work because of many reasons (like we do have contract with clients for not showing our premium work to others), but it doesn't mean they cann't fulfil the project work.

Last, the experienced team always demand competative price. They invest their time learning complex concepts and they need to make sure to get enough return.

I could go on and write down all other reasons that affect success of your project development, but I do know, if you look closely the offshore team and and find anything relevant with above points, then my advise is to close project at earliest. You won't need to invest your hard earn money anymore.  

No one denies the benefits of outsourcing the work if you don't have expertise or want to share work load with offshore team. I myself was very disappointed couple of years ago when I used one of outsource team without understanding the close gap. They wasted my time and money, and also spoiled my hard earn reputation with clients. I rebuilt my development team and once again started delighting my clients. 

Between, you can reach me directly and hire our outsource/offshore consulting and engineering services.