IT and software project outsourcing requires a special approach to budgeting and planning, which is different from in-house IT project setup and management. In this article we’ll talk about the challenge for outsourced IT project management and describe a few services that help cost-effectively manage IT project outsourcing activities.
IT Project Outsourcing: the Challenge
There’s one fact about outsourced IT project management: most of the projects sabotage their budgets during the resource allocation phase. Because an outsourced IT project starts with a guesstimate and people responsible for the project budgeting usually have no idea of IT project planning, the budget can be inefficient and imbalanced before the project start.
Often even having reserve funds may not be enough for running the project. This project consumes a lot of resources which aren’t planned in the budget. As a result, the project needs for extra capacity or faces system problems.
Most outsourcers, financial planners and CEOs can tell you that it’s really hard (or even impossible) to develop an efficient project budget that covers all IT costs. While setting up an outsourced IT project from scratch seems to be hard enough because of having a finite project budget, there’s one simple way to solve this challenge. This is about moving all IT project management (PM) functions on a contract basis. This means that IT “outsourcers” can do the project better when they’re provided with a set of services that help minimize costs, reduce risk of failure, and improve performance.
Outsourcing Service
One of the simplest ways to reduce the cost of IT project management and minimize IT project failure is through providing the outsourced team with a range of services that could help them feel more competent and be prepared for handling almost any IT project management challenge.
Let’s review these important services.
- Training. The first and foremost service required for improving software project outsourcing refers to providing training for staff. The IT PM training service is an extremely valuable function that helps to save a lot of money and drastically improve team productivity through teaching employees, sharing knowledge, and gaining IT project management certification.
- Real-Time Support. IT project outsourcing support is critical to team leadership and motivation, especially in projects which are based on timelines and milestones. This service can be provided through using conferencing and teleworking tools of IT project management software that supports real-time user collaboration.
By means of teleworking solutions and IT project management software, team members can use helpdesk, conferencing systems, phone calls and webinars to discuss issues, handle challenges and make suggestions. Senior management of outsourced IT projects can remotely lead the team and cost-efficiently make assignments and delegate roles. This IT project management service lets reduce costs of team communications and collaboration.
- Backup. Making a backup in outsourced IT projects is critical, especially for software project outsourcing. Many outsourcers provide full backup solutions that allow saving and keeping information in secure remote locations. This IT project management service lets significantly reduce the risk of data loss and increase data protection.
- Support of Dedicated Servers and Hardware. This IT project outsourcing service is extremely important to cost-effective software project outsourcing because for most software projects it’s required to use hardware and servers for creating a foundation for IT outsourcing and managing activities.
By deploying dedicated servers and hardware, both managers and team members benefit from increased accessibility, improved data protection, simplified collaboration and other IT outsourcing options.
- Consultation. Perhaps, this is one of the most valuable IT project outsourcing services in terms of IT support. Besides IT project management training, senior management can involve external experts in project environment analysis and get IT PM consultation regarding efficiency and performance. Expert judgement and advice will help save cost and improve IT procurements by conducting a full analysis of the project.