"Small things" in outsourcing"

When talking about outsourcing management, I don't know what other CIOs think is the most difficult? For me, in the outsourcing management process, there is a link that I have never done very well-developed-human-day computing. I once shared this problem with a senior in the industry. He said: "After more than 10 years of it, how can we make things like human computing impossible ?" There is no denying the truth that man-day computing does seem like a "small thing", but it is also a necessary and important link in the project development process.

 

According to my observations, many software projects have a lot of problems in this process, full of the so-called "four-shot project"-pat your head, it is estimated that it will take about a long time to complete; pat your chest, make sure it is okay. Pat the thigh and say "it's a pity", but it's not done. Pat the ass and leave, and leave the stall to the next one.

In practice, I have encountered a 100% difference between the outsourcers and our daily computing. There are many specific reasons for the differences in man-day computing, including the differences in methodologies between the two parties and different process document specifications. No matter what the cause is, once this happens, both parties must start some negotiation work to reach a consensus.

 

In terms of determining the person-days of each project, it is my ideal situation that the partner can provide an almost accurate calculation method, and each time we work together, we only need to take out this formula, after calculation, you can determine the person-days required for this project. Of course, the accuracy of 100% in the person-day evaluation is impossible, so we need to maintain long-term cooperation with outsourcing partners. Only when the time is extended will the problems in computing be evenly distributed to every project, and the problem will almost disappear. However, unfortunately, so far, I have not seen which outsourcing service provider can provide such a formula. Therefore, before I outsource a project, I will evaluate the person-day evaluation internally and compare the number with the quote of the External Store. If the difference between the two is within a certain percentage, the project directly enters the development stage and no subsequent negotiation actions are made.

 

In addition to human-day evaluation, there are still a few "small things", which are an important consideration in my long-term cooperation with outsourcing partners.

 

The complementarity of outsourcers. Almost certainly, there must be more customers in the external sector than in our IT department. One of my teachers once said: "One of the sources of innovation is to copy some practices in different fields to their own fields ." This sentence can be understood as "the source of creativity is not important. The key is that you are the first person to discover new things ." It is obviously unrealistic for CIOs to visit other people from day to night. In this case, outsourcing partners can become CIOs. without violating the law, it can well supplement the deficiencies of CIOs. Of course, on the other hand, CIOs should also prepare their own ideas to be copied elsewhere.

 

Better integration with partners in terms of systems. Generally, a certain number of technical vendors in the outsourcing industry have their own complete methodology, and the IT department of an enterprise is not a professional software company after all, it is impossible to invest too much effort in this aspect. Therefore, it is better to integrate yourself into the other party's system than develop one thing on your own. Fortunately, in order to maintain long-term cooperation with Party A, the outsourcers are very happy to transplant their systems to the project, and CIOs basically do not need to spend any money on this service. However, this seems to be a permanent method, and sometimes it brings challenges to CIOs. When CIOs have several different outsourcing partners, the challenge is coming-Do your employees need to adapt to several different methodologies?

 

My practice on this issue is to first spend a lot of energy studying the methodology of the early-stage partners and find several different partners to try. Once a good operation mode is confirmed, I will follow this mode to add partners later. After all, the budget is in the hands of Party A, so Party A has a strong initiative.

 

Use outsourcing partners to reconcile internal resource conflicts. The basic position of the IT department in the enterprise should be a technical department, but as a department supervisor, I really don't want to associate the words "technology and tools" with myself too closely, my team members also hope they can consider business operations more. This seems to be in the opposite direction of technical positioning, and has created a conflict in actual operation. I think it is a good choice to use the resources of outsourcing partners to resolve this conflict. At present, there is a supervisor in our IT department who manages all programmers and is also responsible for the overall direction of technical solutions. During the planning process, I don't mind "borrowing" resources from outsourcing partners.

These considerations are based on the assumption that CIOs want to maintain long-term cooperation with outsourcing partners. If this premise is not true, everything is a different story.