What to Offshore

Once you make the decision of offshore outsourcing, now the question comes. What to offshore?

Some companies are contemplating outsourcing whole departments; others are choosing to outsource individual projects. Here are some guidelines that will help you decide what kind work to send offshore.

Data conversions and system migrations are typical projects taken offshore with well-defined requirements and specifications and minimal end-user interaction with the development team. Naturally, the company must be willing to allow its application code to be located offsite during development.

Application development projects are also good offshore candidates. From a standard Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) perspective,offshore work is most beneficial in the construction and testing phases where end-user interaction is limited, and the task is well defined. For stable applications, most maintenance activities can be performed remotely so application maintenance is also a good candidate for offshore outsourcing.

As a rule of thumb, all non-core functions can be moved offshore, where as the companies concentrate on the strategic core functions. Here is an example of core vs non –core functions in Application Development and Maintenance.