How Software Outsourcing Can Reduce Your Time to Market

Often, the key to a successful software development product is getting a quality product to market fast. However, this isn’t always easy, especially when talented domestic developers are expensive and hard to find. That’s why software outsourcing is often the answer to decrease your time to market, ensuring your product reaches your customers before the competition for the right price. Here is a guide to using outsourcing to reduce your time to market even further, while delivering a software product your customer base will love.

Keep the Development Team Small

There are a number of advantages to a smaller development team, and it’s something you should consider when software outsourcing. Smaller teams ultimately mean less people with differing opinions, allowing you to understand each individual team member better. This also creates an environment where there’s less of a chance of poor communication or miscommunication between you and team members. In the end, large teams are usually a hassle, and create situations that become unmanageable when you are trying to reduce your time to market as much as possible.

Have Both Parties on the Same Page

It’s important to have everybody involved in a project on the same page. That means sharing information upfront and ensuring that there’s an open line of communication throughout the life of a project to reduce back and forth that slows down the development process. It also helps keep continuous requests for new data or direction on a project to a minimum.

Ensuring your team and you are on the same page also ensures fewer revisions on a project. When you and your development team understand what to expect from one another, a project can be completed more quickly and with less chance for error the first time around.

Furthermore, a contract is highly important in ensuring both parties have a clear understanding of what’s required. A contract is set in stone, and nobody can dispute it since both parties signed and agreed to its specific stipulations.

Manage Well

Strong project management is critical to ensuring that outsourcing aligns with your development goals. Address the challenge of communicating across time zones and cultures.  Ensure you maintain control over a project from beginning to end in order to reduce the potential of slip ups. That means having a clear plan and timeline of when every step needs to be done, and firm deadlines that need to be met.

Project management software can also help you can oversee the workflow process, assign tasks to your team, and ensure your team receives alerts when a deadline is approaching. Throughout this process, it’s important to keep open and clear communication a priority, which will help you maintain an overview of how your project is developing.

Competitive Advantage

Outsourcing with the right software development team has a number of benefits.  These include getting your product to market faster and doing so at a lower cost.  To garner these, you need to pick a partner with a track record of delivering quality software to market in a timely manner. The selection process can be time consuming and difficult.  That’s why working with an experienced outsourcing partner like Accelerance can make sense.  We have developed a network of 50 certified partners (on, near and offshore) and can help you reduce your outsourcing selection process from months to days.