Agile and Outsourcing

At first blush, agile methods and outsourcing seem to be somewhat disconnected and irrelevant to each other. On the contrary, they have never been needed more by each other than now.

Benefits of Agile Process
IT Team seeks a number of benefits from Agile Development, such as improvements in time-to-benefits, overall quality and efficiency, team morale, the relationship between IT and business staff, and responsiveness to changes. Using Agile process, many large companies have cut their defect rates almost by 60% and customer satisfaction has increased by 30%.

Benefits of Outsourcing
The benefits of outsourcing map directly to the faster, better and cheaper challenges facing most application development organizations. Result of outsourcing shows approx. 44% increase in productivity, 30% competitive advantage and 20% customer satisfaction

Blending the Two

During the past 24 months, companies have begun to blend Agile process and outsourcing to realize incremental gains. The benefits that teams achieve already doing offshore or teams already doing Agile development are quite different.

• Injecting Outsourcing into Agile development projects

The culture and geographic distance imposed by offshore outsourcing increases risk even further than just distributing an internal development team. However, offshore development offers opportunities to save money – over and above the benefits teams achieve with Agile development.

• Injecting Agile processes into Outsourced projects

Properly injecting Agile techniques into an outsourced project can add improved responsiveness and business alignment to the list of outsourced benefits

To make outsourced projects more successful, IT teams have had to dramatically alter or improve their software process. For example, end users have had to learn how to specify their requirements carefully and understand that changing those requirements could cause massive cost and time overruns. Many end users struggle to deal with this rigidity, and their inability to deal with it can negate much of the savings the outsource model has to offer. Here, Agile development process comes handful, as it can actually address these key issues by injecting into this equation, the ability for teams to communicate in a rich way. Communication takes center stage, between the end user, the internal IT staff, and outsources consultants. Short iterations force frequent reviews so end users can approve or reject functionality before too much time or money has been spent on that deliverable.

Key Risks
For a highly complex or strategic projects, they shouldn’t be lend for outsource model, at least for the first few releases. Once major technology risks are addressed, the subsequent releases can incorporate outsourcing

Big names with Outsourced Agile Development process

• Cognizant Technology Solutions
  
• ITC Infotech India
• ThoughtWorks
• Valtech