Though we are in the testing and virtualization business, over the last 5 years we have had a lot of requests from customers for our advice about working with one or more outsourcing firms. Since we have encountered virtually every kind of working arrangement in our engagements, we do have some experience encountering both successful - and unsuccessful - teams comprised of multiple services partners.
Given the current market conditions for IT outsourcing, it seems like there is more uncertainty than ever in this realm. Outsourcing is still a must-do activity for at least some of any large enterprise IT budget.
For the most part we've kept our advice to the realm of working with our SI partners - as part of working with joint end customers, we need to cover how to better collaborate on quality, validate that business requirements like accuracy and performance benchmarks are met, and improve agility to deliver new features ahead of schedule.
There are many up-front aspects of properly selecting, negotiating contracts and defining requirements that will make or break a project - too much to cover here - but in our experience once the partners are selected, what defines the back-end of delivering a successful project?
The number one post-agreement issue we've found when companies have deployment issues and cost overruns in working with services firms, is that partners must be rewarded not just on delivery, but delivering with quality. We're not talking about simply handing down a set of requirements and enforcing them. Good collaboration is a two-way street - both the consumer and provider of services must be responsible for defining and delivering things that are tested, and testable.
Anyway, we wrote what we think is a pretty good primer on the topic - you can get the new paper here: "iTKO Whitepaper : Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality" - http://www.itko.com/site/resources/collaborativequality.jsp. We can't tell you who to work with, but we can provide some advice we've seen on what works!
We'll be posting further thoughts on collaboration between multiple on-shore and offshore teams here - your thoughts and questions on the topic are welcome.
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