Continuous improvement is widely recognized as an important aspect of modern agile software development, but it is also similar to exercise. Like this? At the…
Continuous improvement is widely recognized as an important aspect of modern agile software development, but it is also similar to exercise. Like this? Insofar as despite all the literature and data proving that it is beneficial, it requires a lot of discipline to be put into constant practice.
While there are many examples of how outsourced IT services provide strategic benefits (cost, access to talent, ability to scale and flex resources quickly without lengthy hiring processes), here are four concrete examples of how it can lead to improvements in the way an organization develops software:
1. The value of sharing documentation
There are many common problems that naturally occur as teams build products. Individuals become domain experts, but they can also become information silos. Documentation is scarce or non-existent. Problems are solved creatively, but this can also lead to improvisation. All of this can happen while creating great products. But it can also contribute to technical debt and, ultimately, higher risks as individuals become single points of failure.
Our standard approach to engaging customers includes a detailed review of the technology and tools in place, how engineers interact with the project (each step from accessing a repository to how the code is deployed to production), and features/functionality of the product. All of this has the main objective of documenting this information to find opportunities for subsequent improvements.
Architecture and tools are often discussed and agreed upon as standards, and tasks can be redistributed to avoid siled domain knowledge. Socializing this information through documentation in a form (documents, web pages, whiteboards, and even Slack channels) is a natural outcome of this process.
Doing this adds value to the entire technology organization and facilitates the recruitment of any employee, whether outsourced or a member of the internal team. These benefits represent pure added value by opting for outsourcing.
2. Next-Level Performance and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
One of the first things we want to understand when we start working with a new team is how success is tracked and measured. While we have our own set of KPIs that we like to use, each project and each organization has its own particular goals that reflect the problems being solved, as well as the general culture.
However, asking the question can reveal different answers, which leads to a healthy review of KPIs, or even the creation of new ones. Ultimately, outsourcing means giving up some control, and this often causes more pressure to demonstrate that we are meeting and exceeding expectations in a shorter time frame or to a higher standard than in-house teams.
The advantage of this conversation is that it often creates a higher standard, even for internal teams or new KPIs that better align with current project, product, or organizational priorities and strategy. Even if KPIs remain the same and are applied to outsourced teams, sharing them with third parties can improve visualization of existing data through dashboards or other tools.
3. Signaling Cybersecurity Threats
While the common belief is that outsourcing can create additional exposure and security risk, this is not the case in practice and the cybersecurity risk in outsourcing can be mitigated. We have found that this can actually lead to a healthy review of current practices that reveals opportunities to introduce new controls and standards that ultimately strengthen an organization against external threats.
For example, when working in highly regulated environments, access to personally identifiable information (PII) is often limited to the smallest number of people. A team may be using production data to test software, which means extending teams through outsourcing can increase exposure and impact compliance.
A better practice might be to create better test data with obfuscation, or a review of the tests in general might reveal a lack of code coverage, automation, or separation of concerns that led a team to this practice in the first place. In this case, outsourcing creates the synergy necessary for improvements that also reduce technical debt.
Outsourcing requires remote access to resources, which provides the perfect opportunity to review all of the organization's endpoints to ensure the correct security controls, practices, and standards are in use. Least privilege and zero trust are becoming the standard even on internal platforms, and outsourcing can provide a boost to apply this across the enterprise.
Finally, having the appropriate controls in place to allow any distributed team (third party or internal) to have secure access to resources should be a high priority for any organization. Outsourcing can only help move an organization towards this goal.
4. To-do’s prepared and organized
Now is the time of year when annual goals and objectives are finalized and projects are launched. But when the product roadmap exceeds actual capacity, there is a rush to fill that gap. If the backlog has not been properly prepared, your excellent onboarding process achieved through (1) above will result in rushing and waiting. While business leaders may have a clear vision of strategic product objectives, breaking this down into achievable tasks is a difficult task that requires time, intense focus, and discipline.
For many of our clients, software development enables their core business, but is not necessarily their core competency. Thus, business owners can become overwhelmed with this responsibility without adequate training or experience in agile software development. This creates a bottleneck that becomes more critical and visible when engineering efforts are expanded through outsourcing.
To ensure the backlog is ready, we often source not only engineers but also Agile product owners who know precisely how to interpret business problems and end-user value propositions and create epics and user stories that our engineers can easily break down into tasks and, ultimately, working software.
Conclusion
Outsourcing software development is not just about tactical capabilities, but also about leveraging know-how and improving processes across the entire company, benefiting from a partner whose core competency is software delivery.
