Group Members International Enterprise Hosted Social Networking Community Platforms

10 Tips for Outsourcing Your Development Projects

1. Define your outsourcing expectations.
View outsourcing your development to Group Members International as a business solution to augment your current operations and create efficiencies. Don’t just measure you success in dollars, but in the freeing up of management time and company resources.

2. Be realistic and listen to your outsource vendor
Interfaces may not work as smooth or have customization options as plentiful as those of desktop applications. Figure out your workflow requirements and the work within the limits of the current state of technology. Try not to reinvent the wheel.

3. Assess yourself.
Quantify your baseline bandwidth, storage, and reliability requirements and usage for your social media and community platform. A hosted service can offset the costs of underutilized resources. Although you need to start with certain baseline requirements, the application platform needs to be designed for ease of scalability so the hosting solution for bandwidth, storage, and reliability, can grow with the success of your development efforts.

4. Identify your strengths and weaknesses.
Work within your department’s skill sets for in house work; outsource to vendors the projects that are beyond your personnel’s current skill sets. A six month training course in a programming language is no match for ten years of experience.

5. Follow the money.
Know before hand that the outsource vendor is in the project to make money. Know the costs associated with the different aspects of your project to protect yourself. Get your finance gurus to come up with valuation metrics and fiscal models that will quantify your vendor’s payment model compared with that of other solutions. Take into account your current infrastructure, maintenance, administration, and upgrade costs.

6. Do your due diligence.
Consider a third-party audit, which should include security of transactions and data. Evaluate the vendor's experience, technical expertise, and scalability options.

7. Plan migration paths.
Have a path for data migration and integration with other systems from the start and a plan for termination. This will help avoid locking into a single vendor or having to start all over if the vendor cancels before the project is completed.

8. Involve your legal team.
Make sure a lawyer is on board to review the licensing issues and intellectual property rights. Legal representation will also be of value during contract negotiations. Bear in mind the protection is a two way necessity, you want to treat your vendor as you would like to be treated.

9. Control your services.
Assign yearly budgets and resources. Establish ongoing ROI and performance metrics to determine whether the vendor achieves your objectives.

10. Maintain open communication.
Keep everyone apprised of goals and listen to their concerns. In this way, you will build trust. Keep in mind that your provider and its representatives are now an integral part of your business, so treat them as members of your team.