People make the difference

What will be the key to the success of IT service outsourcing project?

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

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I’ve been thinking about this question for years. I have noticed that most of successful projects have some common traits:

• in-time high quality communication
• onsite + offsite engagement model
• staffed with capable people
• start with a small team and scale up gradually
• low turnover rate

Of those points, some are strongly related with people. Then, what we should do in the light of these points?

• Build up a balanced team. Vendor company has the motivation to staff a strategic project with the best people it has in house. However, this might lead to an unbalanced team. No adoubt, it’s much secure to have a team with top level talents. However, I have observed that this kind of team has a relatively higher attrition rate than a balanced team which is staffed with talented people and less talented people. An explanation is that talented people don’t like to work on routine works which tend to be not that fun.
• Manage the risk of turn-over. Though there are a lot of factors leading to turn-over, some of them can still be managed and eliminated if we take care of them ahead. There is a saying that people join companies but leave managers. It implies that, as a manager, you should respect people’s idea, develop their career path and create fun work for them. Though there are some factors which may be out of your control, such as compensation, family and re-location, you can still do what you can do to retain talents as longer as possible.
• Renew the organization positively. Usually, we only renew the organization passively, which may lead to unwanted result, such as short transition and the lost of knowledge. If you can renew the organization as planned, that’ll place you a safe position where you can shape the organization at leisure.
• Motivate people properly. Admitted, people are different and their purpose on getting a job may also be different. Hence, the way you can motivate them differs. For a person who is pursuing his/her technical growth, you can motive him/her by introducing more technical challenges to him/her. For a person who is looking for the opportunity in managerial domain, you may encourage him/her to take the initative to make something happen through his/her coordination.

All in all, people are human beings who have feeling, emotions and needs and we can not simply put them as resources.