9 steps to successfully outsource your software

With the growing demand for digitalization, especially with the wave that we’ve seen after COVID-19, a lot of businesses turn to software outsourcing companies to take make their business digital. The businesses that are encountering software outsourcing for the first time or looking to find new outsourcing might be overwhelmed by the entire process of outsourcing software. This article breaks it down into simple steps that will help you to run your project successfully.

You need to figure out 3 things to successfully outsource your product — understand what is it exactly you are going to build, find a good outsourcing partner to build it for you, efficiently collaborate with your outsourcing partner.

Here are 9 simple steps you can take to successfully develop software in collaboration with your outscouring partner.

1.Define your product

One of the most important things for successful collaboration and the product delivery is to explain to your outsourcing partner what you are looking for in as detail as you can. Try to think of all the ways that your users are going to use the application, all the tools that will be needed to administer your application. Here are some points to keep in mind:

• Is your product going to be a web, mobile, or desktop application?
• Who is your target audience?
• Are users going to login into the app? Is there one kind of user, or do you have users with different access levels?
• Try to break down app usage scenarios into stories and describe them e.g. describe the entire flow of users searching for the products, adding products into a basket, and checking them out.
• Describe all the administrative tools you will need — reports, content editing, user management.

The best way for this is to create an RFP document. Feel free to use the template used by our team at AOByte, you can download the free RFP template from here.

Hint: Detailed RFP can bring down the cost of your project. It is an industry-standard to consider safety buffers, whenever a project is lacking a clear definition. Fewer unknowns means that there would be less safety buffer considered in the budget.

2.Define your MVP

It is common to put the entire vision for the product into RFP meanwhile it is very important to have a long-term vision for the product and share it with your partners, it is even more important to define the MVP. MVP, which stands for a minimum viable product is the version of the product with minimally acceptable features that you think you will need to validate your idea. MVPs are very important as they allow us to get the product out in a shorter timeline with a smaller budget and validate the idea.

Example: Imagine you are creating a website that allows users to acquire daily healthy food subscriptions for their pets. It would be nice to display a list of similar products whenever users are adding items into a basket, but there is good debate whether you need similar items to feature for your idea validation.

3. Do your research

Now that you have an RFP and MVP in mind do your research. There may be existing software that covers your needs, or maybe there is software that covers your needs partially but is enough to validate your idea. Based on the previous example it would be a lot more cost-efficient to set up an online store using Shopify rather than create a custom e-commerce website.

Hint: Expect your outsourcing partner to present you with these kinds of options.

4. Get an estimate

In case you concluded that you still need custom software submit both RFP and MVP documents to outsourcing companies to get a quote. Ask for an estimate for both MVP and full product. Submit your RFP document to multiple outsourcing companies to get different opinions.

Hint: Usually you’ll receive a lot of questions from the companies who are trying to dive deep into the matter.

5. Models of collaboration

Although there are numerous ways of collaboration they can be split into two categories — fixed bid, and time and materials.

A fixed bid is a case with an exact scope of the project, budget, and timeline are defined before the project start. Although this model may seem cost-efficient the first glance, in reality usually that’s not the case. Modern software is designed in two-week cycles (I will talk about this later in this article), and the requirements of the product are refined and revisited after each cycle, it is also very common for a product to pivot and change direction throughout implementation, which means that the scope of the project can change dramatically. This may lead to a painful and time-consuming change management process, which slows down product delivery.

Time and materials means the contract is fixing per hour costs rather than project scope. Of course in this case, also the outsourcing company provides and estimates to let customers know about the approximate costs of developing the software. The time and materials model significantly reduce the pain of change management, and allows to work in a truly agile fashion. It is also common to combine fixed bid and t&m models, in this case, the project is kicked off with a small fixed bid proof of concept and then continued using the time and materials model.

6. Questions to be asked

Some important questions have to be answered, in case you don’t find the received proposal make sure to ask them directly

• Who is going to be testing the product?
• Who is going to be responsible for the deployment of the project?
• How is the product acceptance going to be handled?
• How is the support of the product going to be handled after the release?
• Who is going to be responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the product?

7. Understand how software is created

It will come as a huge benefit to you to have a high-level understanding of how software is created and how teams are functioning. One of the most common methods is Scrum, which is an agile development methodology used to develop software using an incremental process. Scrum team operates in sprints, cycles each of them is 2–4 weeks long. Before each sprint, the team does sprint planning to establish the deliverables for the upcoming sprint. Each sprint is completed with a customer demo.

Hint: Sprint plannings and demos are great for clarifying requirements, constant feedback and clarifications allow for true agile software development.

8. The product owner role

One of the roles on the scrum team is the product owner, product owner is the one who translates business requirements and product vision to the team, help define product and priorities. Product owners are unsung heroes of a lot of successful products. No matter how detailed your RFP might be defined there are always a lot of questions that require brainstorming, refining, and prioritization.

Hint: Consider a full-time dedicated position for the product owner role.

9. Be in a constant touch

Be in constant communication with the team, provide as much feedback as you can, provide it as early as you can, participate in brainstorming sessions, make the team part of your internal brainstorming sessions, brief news ideas with the team. I cannot describe how dramatically the final delivery timeline can change depending on how efficiently the feedback pipeline was functioning.