Vishal BhatiaPART 2
In Part 1, we started our discussion on what the biggest mistakes to avoid are. If you haven’t read it, click here to read.
Today we’ll continue laying out those important things to watch out for.
Mistake #4 – Losing control of your project
If you think you’re going to be able to simply hand over your project on day one, and a few months later have someone hand you your finished source code, like a Grande Latte at Starbucks, you’re sorely mistaken.
To cut a potentially long story short, regardless of how good your vendor is, you need to have a process, a system, to control their activities, track their progress, and correct problems, BEFORE they get out of hand.
There are tons of tools and development methods to help you do this. For more information on what they are and how to use them, check out this blog post from September.
Mistake #5 – Failing to measure success… or the lack of it
Depending on the nature of your project, the metrics that constitute success can be wildly different. If you don’t have a way to accurately measure these on a regular basis, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
You can see a full breakdown of how to measure success in this blog post from October. For now though, the most important thing is for you to commit to tracking something from the very beginning.
As long as the metric you track in some way indicates that your project is moving forward, what it is doesn’t matter.
Mistake #6 – Not protecting your intellectual property
Whether you’re planning to sell your new software, or simply use it in-house, the integrity of your intellectual property is a key consideration.
You need to ensure you have the proper contracts with your vendor, so they assign ownership of all copyrights to you. Otherwise, they, or even their engineers, could be the legal owners of the copyright.
Protecting your intellectual property is extremely important of course, but you also need to make sure you protect other people too.
If your software is created using any open source code, then you need to ensure you’re in compliance with its license agreement.
For more information on how to protect your intellectual property, check out this blog post from November.
Mistake #7 – Paralysis by analysis
Are you feeling confused, unsure, excited, yet hesitant? Good.
This is where you should be; you have all the information, now it’s time to make an informed decision.
Most people will become overwhelmed at this point, and rather than make a decision about whether outsourcing is right for them, they’ll over-analyze the situation, and become paralyzed.
If you’ve got this far in this blog, then it’s safe to assume you’re seriously considering outsourcing.
Click here to learn more about what we can offer you.
