Developing applications and games without outsourcing teams is practically never done nowadays. If the project is large enough, the company almost always engages outsourced workers to help. It may be cheaper, more efficient, and more profitable, but only if the outsourcing team fulfills the set tasks accurately and if these tasks are clearly formulated. Working with an outsourcing team is similar to cooperating with a writing service like payforessay.net, where students order papers. At the same time, they must describe the task to the writer in as much detail as possible to get the desired result. So it is with outsourcing. Setting the right goal and properly determining the hired staff’s professionalism will be part of your project’s success.
Setting Goals and Voicing Expectations
Before hiring an outsourced team, you should clearly understand what part of the job they are expected to accomplish. You can’t hire employees and talk about theoretical goals. Your tasks should be specific, measurable, and achievable within the budget and timeframe you set. If you phrase the task poorly, set unrealistic deadlines, or allocate an inadequate budget, a good result will be a miracle. This triangle of deadlines, complexity, and funding should be equilateral, and only then can you be sure of success.
Apart from this, all your assignments for the outsourcing team should be documented and approved. You need evidence and confirmation of your requirements to monitor and keep the work productive throughout the entire project. This can be technical specifications, timelines, and specific quality terms and conditions.
If your project involves multiple phases of development, regular discussion of the work and checking intermediate results is essential. You should follow one simple truth that doctors most often repeat: “Prevention is much easier and cheaper than cure.”
Assessing Productivity
The first thing to say is that you must first decide on the team. To do this, you need to do a preliminary valuation and review the performance of external employees. This is like an essay writing service review for students to understand whether it is worth cooperating with the service and what services real professionals provide. Once you have decided on the team, you need to determine the criteria for evaluating their productivity.
KPI, or key performance indicators, should become your deskbook for working with an outsourcing team. With these metrics, you can literally feel the productivity of the team. In general, performance metrics can be evaluated using three main metrics.
Cycle Time
This metric gives you the ability to play with time. Not in the literal sense of the word, of course, but it shows how much time the outsourcing team takes to complete tasks. It is important to remember that this metric is not about individual numbers but about stability throughout the work. If a team fulfills one task before the deadline and fails all extra deadlines for another, you should look for the problem and fix it in order not to get a defect at the end of the project.
Budget and Timeline Adherence
This metric often gets the most attention in an audit because it directly relates to costs. However, it doesn’t always mean poor-quality work if a team goes over budget or over schedule. Before reprimanding or terminating contracts, return to the imaginary triangle and ensure you have provided realistic deadlines and funding.
Defect Density
This indicator evaluates the back end of the work, namely the development process itself. Here, you can notice the number of defects in the code and the speed of their correction. A small number of defects and quick fixing time are not a problem. The problem is when defects are constant and extensive. This can speak about the professionalism of developers and may require adjusting the staff, as critical errors on the final tests can ruin the whole project.
Assessing the Work Quality
Assessing the quality of the outsourcing team’s work should include regular code reviews, automated testing, and user feedback analysis.
Code Review
Regular testing is worth conducting before the code is integrated into the project’s main branch. This process improves the quality of the code. In addition, it involves communication between outsourced developers and the core team, which helps build relationships and improve understanding of the final goals for everyone.
Automated Testing
This is a mandatory part of the quality assessment of the work. The more tests the code undergoes, the more stable and reliable the build you will get. This is especially important for projects where stability and security are critical, such as financial or medical applications.
Users Feedback
This step is important to understand whether you will cooperate with this development team in the future. If users complain about the stability or quality of the product created by the outsourced part of the team, there may be errors in planning and tasking or in the programmers’ work themselves.
Project Management and Communication
The more productive conversations, the better. It is important to realize that these should not be empty rallies discussing obvious things. Each time, you should prepare specific questions and clarifications for the outsourcing team and demand the same questions and requests for improvement. In this case, it is worth establishing a system of regular reports from developers to indicate the specific stage of task fulfillment and plans for the next period. It is also equally important to synchronize the outsourcing team’s work with the project’s core. For example, daily stand-ups help maintain a common work rhythm and quickly respond to emerging problems.
The second, and no less important, stage of project management is transparency. Employees should know about the final product and understand what is expected of them, and you should be open to criticism and suggestions to improve the project’s work and achieve the desired product at the end.
Conclusion
Program development in management control is not much different from other businesses at its core. Development has nuances of performance measurement, quality control, and task scheduling, but the basic steps, such as communication, openness, and analysis, remain common. Also, it remains a common and complex approach, thanks to which it is possible to create quality products that will help users and work stably.
