Tips of choosing the right offshore development company

By admin on August 9th, 2010

Tips of choosing the right offshore development company

Are you looking to hire a offshore dedicated programmer? Then i will explain the pros and cons of hiring a dedicated remote programmer. The first step is to identify the skills you are looking in a programmer is it specific to 1 or 2 primary skills or you are looking for someone who has worked in multi technology platform. Following are the top IT programming tools and technologies used worldwide

LAMP (PHP, MYSQL)
.NET
ASP.NET
ASP
Visual Basic
Wordpress
Joomla
SQL SERVER
ORACLE
ERP
JAVA
J2EE
JavaScript
SAP
SEO
Os commerce
AJAX / CSS
Photoshop
Flash
Social Networking applications
Iphone
Ipad
Facebook Applications
Windows OOPS
And many more

These above software technologies are the few of the most commonly used technologies worldwide. However it may vary depending upon the customer requirements, demand, cost, security, scalability, compatibility and other factors.

Before hiring you should be very specific about the skills of the programmer this is due to the fact that many programmers are proficient in certain skills and might not be comfortable with other software tools and technologies. If you are looking for someone experienced in most common platform i.e. web technologies then you might find several potential candidates. I would advise you look beyond the programming skills and consider the below factors.

  1. Communication Skills
  2. Working Hours and Time Zone
  3. Project management skills i.e. any experience in project management would be an advantageous
  4. Organisational skills
  5. Time management skills
  6. Any previous experience working in a similar role
  7. Broadband speed and power backup facility
  8. External database backup facility
  9. Firewalls and network security
  10. PC configurations and specifications
  11. Required software licenses
  12. Cost of any additional software you need
  13. Timetable of bank holidays

Major challenges when you hire someone offshore might include

  1. communication gap
  2. different time zone
  3. Cultural differences
  4. Data confidentiality  issues
  5. PC and network security
  6. Power and data backup

Hiring Steps

Step 1
 Shortlist at least 4-5 offshore development companies the companies you shortlist should belong to your country and should not be solely based offshore. There are many companies which are based in UK and USA and have their offshore offices in other part of the world. It can be much easier for you to manage your offshore project and if anything goes wrong you can take legal action within in your own country.

Step 2
From your list of 4-5 potential offshore partners reduce it to 1-2 on the basis on the below criteria

  • Doe they offer your preferred working hours?
  • How much experience do they have in offshore outsourcing?
  • Do they have instant generator power backup?
  • Do they offer you the software and hardware you require?
  • How much time do they take replace existing resource or team in case someone leave in between your project?
  • What is their SLA?
  • Ask for references and speak to them
  • Do they have daily external backup facilities?

Step 3
Ask for the list of potential candidates for your requirements and ask them to conduct the interviews ask them to send only the shortlisted candidates who exactly matches your requirements and it should not be more than 3-4 for each resource.

Step 4
If you like any candidate and want to hire then ask them to try at least for 1-2 months without making any long term commitments. This will give you time to test the waters and also it will give you overall feel of working with the offshore partner.

Most common mistakes people make while choosing the offshore development partner

  1. Always remember you always get what you pay for so never choose any company only because of price.
  2. Asking for multi skills in an individual – don’t look for jack of all trades and master of none if you have very specific requirements
  3. Choose freelancers who are unable to cope with the workload also remember freelancers will always have other commitments and it can cause delays in the delivery
  4. Choose offshore companies without any base in your home country
  5. Make long term commitments to save the cost.

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