The Complete Guide to IT Outsourcing and Every Phase of the Cooperation with Your IT Partner

Things to Pay Attention to on Every Major Phase of Cooperation

When you decide on the model your project will require, it’s time to look for the service provider. How do you make sure the IT outsourcing company you’ve found is the one? After all, choosing the wrong partner can increase your project’s costs and delay it quite a lot.

Let’s look at the major stages of cooperation with an IT service provider and what you should pay attention to on each stage.

Pre-sale Phase – What to Keep in Mind Before the Agreement is Signed

So, how do you actually find an IT vendor? As with everything else, you will probably Google first. What should you pay attention to when assessing the hundreds of companies worldwide? Here are the most crucial things:

• Reviews. There are various repositories where you can check the vendor’s reviews. The most well known one with reviews on software developers is Clutch. Search for the company you’ve found online and look at what their clients have to say. This is a great way to check if the company has a bad background.
• You should also check if the company has bad reviews from its employees. To do that, search for local job boards and such. If there’s a lot of employees with bad experience with the company, chances are the people assigned to your project won’t be motivated to do a good job.
• Portfolio. When you’ve found a company with good reviews from both clients and employees check their portfolio. If they have projects similar to yours it’s a good idea to make sure they actually delivered those projects. You can ask the company to refer you to their previous clients and ask those clients about their experience.
• Estimation. When you start the communication with the vendor of your choice you should already have a scope of your project ready for them to review. This doesn’t have to be a very detailed document. But the vendor should get at least a high-level understanding of the project. It’s a good sign if they ask a lot of questions about your product and business goals. And take their time to offer an estimate. We at Fulcrum usually take about a week for that.
• Meeting the actual team. It’s a major red flag if the vendor company doesn’t allow you to meet the actual tech specialists who are going to work on your project. This might mean they do not have an in-house team at all and are just hiring freelancers or reselling the projects. So ask to meet a tech lead at least. After you meet the team and discuss your future project, the vendor will provide a proposal. What should this document have?
• Roadmap. The main thing the proposal should have is not the estimated budget. Though it is important. But the main thing in the proposal is the project roadmap. It won’t be a detailed one with all the deadlines set precisely. But it should have the major features listed and the estimated timeline for delivery of those features. And it has to include the discovery phase.
• Tech stack. The proposal has to list both front- and back-end tech stack, cloud architecture, databases etc.
• Project manager and QA. Every project has to have a project manager and quality assurance engineer.
• Maintenance estimate. You should also have an estimation on how much it will take to maintain the project after the MVP is finished and the project is transferred to you.
• Acceptance criteria. The agreement has to list them so you have a clear understanding of what you can expect and what the product will end up like.

It goes without saying – when you have the actual agreement on hand you should check it with a lawyer before signing.

Execution and Delivery Phase

After the agreement is signed the actual work begins. We won’t delve deep into every stage of the software development life cycle here. We’ll just list the main things you should pay attention to.

• Communication. After your IT partner completes the discovery phase you should have a clear understanding of the milestones, sprints, and deliverables. They have to provide a schedule of demos and meetings. The main thing here – you should have a person on the team you can always talk to. So you need to discuss which communication channels are going to be used etc. And you need to be able to be as involved in the project as you want to be.
• Transparency. No plan is perfect. There are always risks and unexpected issues. It’s a major red flag if your vendor tells you everything is going to plan, especially on the initial stages. It is also important that they provide a clear understanding of the architecture and third-party integration the project will require. These things should not become surprises later on. It is a good sign if the vendor provides you with access to Jira. So you can see the daily progress yourself.
• Quality assurance. You can not build good software without fixing bugs. It’s just the fact of life – bugs happen. QA plays a crucial role in delivering a good product to your end-users. So you should pay attention to the way the testing is done. If a critical bug seeps into a release.. Well, you can imagine your losses. So the QA should be done on every stage of development.

Close Phase

When the MVP is ready and released the vendor transfers the project to you. What should you get?

• Access and ownership. You should get access to everything, from the admin panel to the design materials. And you should have full ownership of the code base.
• Documentation. This includes all the business documentation created during the development. And the project requirements as well. You should have every product feature well documented. All the research the vendor did should also be handed to you.