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Is your outsourcer agile enough?

How to decide if your outsourcer is up for the enterprise challenge

By Minda Zetlin, Computerworld, 03/12/12

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Page 6 of 7

It helps to not keep anyone on the late shift for too long, notes Kevin Quick, North America testing lead for Capgemini. "It's a rotational thing, so our people can manage their lives well," he says. "We learned the hard way that if we leave people on the late shift for too long, we tend to lose them."

4. Keep some team members onshore. "My biggest recommendation is to make sure that the designers, architects and engineers are located onshore," Aubel says. "We do a lot of the architecture, design and requirements, and then the specifications we send to the team are pretty well defined. It's just a matter of coding. The challenge arises when you try to start offshoring design and architecture."

But some industry experts are skeptical about this sort of approach for a truly agile methodology. "If you're doing waterfall development, it's OK to have a Java person who only knows J2EE," says Max Rayner, executive-in-residence at Hudson Crossing. "In agile, you want developers who think like business people. It's not enough that they can program. They have to be engaged and challenge the demands, thinking of the outcome rather than the process. So a lot of the outsourcing companies that are coder mills have a problem because they don't have talent that is able to engage with core business matters, just on how well their code is written."

5. Buy lots of plane tickets. Videoconferencing, instant messaging, document-sharing and remote scrum meetings all help, but in the end, nothing compares to meeting face to face. So IT leaders who've successfully managed offshore agile projects recommend frequent visits -- in both directions. "You may have parts of your onshore team going offshore to meet the offshore scrum team in person and introduce them to your technology," Rosendahl advises. "And you might also plan for offshore resources to come onshore to keep the exchange going and continue building these relationships. It's not cheap, and it takes effort and time, but it's well worth it."

Outsourcers as team members
When SciQuest, which provides software-as-a-service supply chain management tools, decided to switch to an agile software development model about five years ago, the company already had a well-established relationship with an outsourcer in India. "A big chunk of our work was being outsourced," says Daryl Broddle, vice president of technology. The outsourcing company was a small, entrepreneurial firm that was willing to change its practices to accommodate the new methodology.

So SciQuest began creating teams, as in a classic agile setup. "The entrepreneurial partner augments our teams," Broddle says. "The teams focus on a strategy, and the developers at the outsourcer participate in our daily standup every two or three days. We've integrated them into our process. We don't write a bunch of stuff down that we send to them."

SciQuest is based in North Carolina, and the two companies deal with the time difference by adjusting their work schedules, something that Broddle says is very manageable. "They come in at 9 or 10 a.m. and work till 6 or 7 p.m.," he says. "We wind up with three to five hours of overlap. And if we need to have a meeting where we have to have a long discussion, then we'll come in at 7 a.m."


For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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