If you are looking at the pros and cons of outsourcing IT needs, you’ve probably come seen dozens of similar articles on the subject. There seems to be a uniform list and understanding of the subject. Most articles focus on:
- IP or Privacy Concerns
- Access to specialized expertise
- Easy to replace outsourced IT
A lot of these are written from the perspective of businesses who have gone through a similar process. And for the most part, these articles offer a valuable and informed perspective on outsourcing. But there seems to be a small detail that is overlooked, and it could be costing companies a large amount of their budget.
Consistency in outsourced IT work can be, pretty much, non-existent. It’s a problem that companies will run into when they outsource the same project, or similar projects, to multiple different vendors.
What does consistency mean for IT?
There is a certain amount of global uniformity among quality IT professionals. If you are a web developer there is a certain way you markup your templates to be compliant with different coding standards. The most popular is w3c which developers try to follow.
Consistency gives you the ability to hand off the same piece of code to multiple people and have them all understand it.
What does consistency mean for the client?
When your project is able to flow seamlessly to different phases, and especially between different developers, it can save you money and time. Your developers are spending less time trying to figure out what the last guy did and more time working to progress the project.
How does this fit outsourcing?
The picture might start to come into play. You’ve got a project, or a website. You’ve outsourced different phases of it to different developers. How much time has been spent mapping old code? How many dollars does that equal? There doesn’t seem to be any resource on how to debug this situation because it has no upfront focus.
The main idea of outsourcing work is through a bidding process.
You post a project. The other guy tells you how much it will cost. He does it. Everyone goes home happy.
This is typically the “idea” of outsourcing. But every contract always has some flex time. Most projects do now END as straight forward as they start. And these hours spent reading old code that has changed hands multiple times could be costing you.
So how do we solve this?
Typically companies that have a full time developer benefit by the unspoken rule that this person will pick up a project he started 3 months ago and get re-aquatinted with it pretty quickly.
If you can’t afford someone to be full time, then you should consider making a relationship with an IT firm or development company that be a partner for a long period of time. A long term outsourcing partner can have uniformity in how they code their projects and reduce time getting acquainted with the updates and phases that you need work on.