📖 TLDR;
🌎 Outsourcing is alive & very well
🤝 Partners not Agency
🚫 Lose the borders, increase cohesion
👨👩👧👦 Define your stakeholders
I’m not sure what you think, but when I think outsourcing, I think, long laborious process of vendor selection, red tape, endless requirements meetings, and teams that are “ok” and “do a job” but ultimately don’t fulfil the true needs of the business and just don’t quite get it. Maybe we’ll try someone new next time or maybe we’ll just put up with them because we can’t afford to go out to selection once more, “at least we know them”. If we break it down, how can they “get it”, they’re a completely different company, with their own values, culture & strategy, located in a different geography and most likely, timezone. More fool you for thinking this was going to be a seamless approach.
Or is it more fool you? we operate in a time of abundance, progression, accessibility and competition. It isn’t enough any more to say or think “thats just the way it is”. Outsourcing partners must do more to support the industry or find themselves become vastly irrelevant and replaced by every organisation across every industry establishing a specialist technical team. Tech Crunch (2021) suggests that an organisation of depth that has learnt from its mistakes can be advantageous for businesses seeking to outsource which undoubtably is true, but the one mistake that is so often breached is the lack of merge resulting in the inevitable “us vs them”. Teams win championships and organisations of all shapes and sizes struggle to establish the team mentality within their own walls so it is little wonder as to why these problems exist in the outsourced world. Commercial interests, so often the key barrier to true cohesion, but why should interests be at risk in the coming together of a client and a facilitating partner? Surely there are common interests, both are striving towards the same goal, the client controls the scope & the outsourced party has the default obligation to deliver, so why the periods of missed requirements, awkward engagements and reconciliation?
To put it simply, this relationship should be no different to an internal business function working with their agile development team. Communication our biggest risk to commercial interest can be facilitated as as well as controlled, roles can be defined, key players identified, accountability established. A team that can operate fluidly within a framework is still a fluid team and one that can innovate and progress like any other.
Outsourcing still has its place in the tech space, but we need to stop being so uptight about it.
