Software Development Outsourcing - Onshore Vs Offshore

Cross-Cultural Communication - an offshore development company

, one in a different time zone, often with quite different business practices and etiquette, different national holidays, and the (not always so) obvious language barrier can be difficult to manage. Now its a given that high quality offshore companies will have a variety of fluent languages spoken, but the simple fact is that slang, different uses of abbreviations and misinterpretation all lead to costly mistakes, creep in budgeted hours and time delays. You just cant beat a native speaker.

Technical specification has to be 100% watertight. Now whilst this is the ideal scenario for every software development project be it onshore or offshore we all know its very difficult to achieve. Its importance however is magnified in an offshore development because the offshore developer is less likely to be experienced in your native development culture and your native marketplace therefore not allowing for flexibility in the build or innovation.

Project Management - change requests and feature creep during a project are difficult enough to manage when both customer and developer are in the same country and communicating effectively and frequently. When the developer is offshore and the specification is continually changing, the risk of failure goes up dramatically. With the best will in the world, many customers find it difficult to resist changing the specification part-way through a project especially given that business needs and priorities do change over time.

Selecting the right partner can be difficult as quality standards are extremely variable across the globe. The communication issue works the other way around here it can be very difficult to make a good judgement on whether an offshore developer is up to the job on the back of a review of their website and a couple of teleconference calls. Hence, a supplier with a proven track record of delivering to the UK and some good UK references are extremely important.

In short there is a somewhat higher risk of failure when sending a software development project offshore, as compared to keeping the development work onshore. The perceived cost savings are often eaten up by additional hours needed to sort out misinterpretation and general communications issues.

by: Jo Amos

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