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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

Page 7 of 7

To further aid collaboration, one of the outsourcer's developers is on-site full time at SciQuest. "He's one of the four people on one of our four-person teams," Broddle says. "I treat him as one of my staff, but he's also our account manager. For instance, if one of the developers in India is not working out well, he handles it."

This scenario has been working well for more than five years, Broddle notes. "They were pretty small and just starting out when we first started partnering with them," he says. "They've grown along with us, and they are now about four or five times as big as they were when we began."

Working with the outsourcer lets SciQuest meet its goal of getting new features to customers faster. "We have three major releases a year, but in between we use focus groups," Broddle says. "We show them new functionality and get their input long before we put a new feature into the production environment. With the outsourcer augmenting our teams, we can get something done and ready to implement in front of our focus groups within a two-week sprint. We're not showing them screenshots -- it's real code."

Zetlin is co-author of The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology Professionals Don't Understand Each Other and Why They Need Each Other to Survive .

Read more about applications in Computerworld's Applications Topic Center.

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