Thriving for more than a decade, outsourcing has been praised as cost-effective, efficient, productive and strategic. However, as benefits come, risks do also, threatening to ruin everything that you have expected to achieve from your outsourcing plan.
1. Different Time Zones
The good news is many vendors have no trouble adapting to this: they can either accommodate a specific working time or switching among their team to ensure there’s always an overlap.
What you need to do is just select the ones that are capable of such. This might especially become a serious problem if your work requires close collaboration with your development team.
Otherwise, you should at least select a suitable time zone, and find a good vendor that works there. The different time zone is a common issue in outsourcing, particularly in an overseas project.
2. Security
What you should do is making sure that your outsourcer had experiences with working on sensitive info and dealing with security problems before.
You want your vendor to guarantee that your data is kept secure every minute, especially when your project contains highly sensitive information. You might be concerned a lot with data security when you decide to outsource your software development to other people.
3. Legal issues
Even in case you’re provided with similar legal protection, you would have to pay a high price in terms of money and time for a transnational lawsuit. For example, companies that transfer their work to India should be aware of intellectual property protection and data privacy and protection in India.
Before a company decides to outsource to another country, they need to consider legal issues may arise in that outsourcing arrangement.
4. Language Problems
One of reason leading to communication failures is that your in-house and development teams do not share the same language. Communication plays a crucial role in outsourcing, especially in order to avoid the first risk. This can occur even if you and they do have a common language for communication, e.g. English, the difference between “your English” and “their English” might be different.
5. Lost of Your Grip on the Process
Discuss with them frequently and honestly so they can understand what you want from the project and how you want them to get it done. This is seen as one of the biggest threats to any CIO.
All-time fluent communication with your outsourcing developers is the key to resolving the problem. The lost of visibility over your project may present a consequence of poor communication between your firm and the outsourced developers that result in less desirable and more costly products.
