Success of outsourcing has always been debatable from the day of its existence.  Every business owner who is willing to outsource their software development requirements to IT solution providers in India or any other developing country will always evaluate the pros and cons of outsourcing process.  In today’s aggressive competition businesses face huge cost pressure and outsourcing their IT project management and development requirement becomes a natural option for cost effective operations.

There are several research reports in market which portray more complex picture of outsourcing wherein organizations are not very satisfied with their current contracts or they are losing confidence in one or other projects. Few of them are considering renegotiating their existing outsourcing contracts or changing the outsourcing partners.

It is really important for business owners to understand the possible pitfalls in outsourcing and how to decide the aces and ploys of outsourcing.

Advantages of Outsourcing:

• Most important factor which business owners enjoy is the cost efficiency in getting their strategy executed. Lower labour and operation cost makes IT leaders a natural supporter of outsourcing.

• Business owners can focus on core activities of their business such as making new strategies to gain new market, sales and marketing activities etc. instead of worrying about their non-core activities.
   
• Huge reduction in maintaining infrastructure cost and headcount which incurs while maintaining non-core activities.

• Outsourcing can help you in streamlining the finances and cash-flow in a focused and with well-defined strategy.

• Turnaround rate of deliverable is topped up with offshore workforce teams and you can align your resources for working on more projects.

• Outsourcing IT services enables business owners to save money on investments on technology and developers and allows them to spend that amount in hiring resources related to their core functions.

• Round the clock support and access to workforce for 24/7. It provides flexibility to realign the resources according to needs and help business owners to focus on gaining new clients.

Disadvantages of Outsourcing:

• The biggest risk in outsourcing is the security of data and information. Lack of proper NDA and other agreements have resulted in leak of information’s and sensitive data.

• Quality is a major concern and business owner’s end up spending a lot on deliverables which are not up-to the mark. This generally happens when the outsourcing vendor is not experienced or there are no quality processes.

• At times business owners end up losing control on the operations and deliverables of the outsourced tasks.

• Lack of defined SLA’s is also one of the main disadvantages of outsourcing. It is always recommended to have detailed SLA’s and cover each and every aspect of business unit to avoid any disappointments at later stages which either can be related to hidden costs or missing features from the deliverable.

• Putting all the eggs in one basket does increase the risk of outsourcing failures. If you are associated with only one software vendor and that vendor goes bankrupt or due to some policy changes they ask to redefine the agreement, you might not enjoy it.

• Communication and management of tasks in different time zones is another possible issue which business owners faces when they outsource their software and IT project management services.

• Trust factor plays important role. It gets worst when business owners noticed lack of transparency from team working on outsourced tasks. It could be due to number of projects offshore team is handling or real experience of resources who are assigned to the projects.

These are only few of the pros and cons of outsourcing software services. Multiple issues may crop up without the clear understanding on projects, objectives etc. Maintaining transparency through project status, regular calls between client and offshore teams are the few main factors which define the outsourcing relationship.

Business owners can easily avoid all these pitfalls by choosing the right offshore partner. It is really important to organizations to review and short-list the solution providers, follow the essential steps for stress-free and successful outsourcing very carefully and align their goals and objectives before giving the contracts.