outsourcing software project offshore

In Most organizations, the IT/Engineering department receives more development requests that it can delivery. Typically a committee consisted from Engineering Diredtor, CTO and business users review such requests.

Overview of Feasibility of Offshore Outsourcing Project:

A new outsourcing project request must pass several criterias , called feasibility study, to see whether it makes sense to coninue further. A typical feasibility study uses four main measurements: operational feasibility, technical feasibility, economic feasibility and project schedule feasibility.

To find more information about new offshore outsourcing project request PM or a system analyst need to perform fact-finding activities by studying company structure, reviewing existing documentations and schemas, conducting interviews and surveys.

Operational Feassibility:

Operational feasibility needs to find out if the proposed project will be used effectively. It needs to answer on the following questions:

• Will the new project result in reducing manual work or improving efficiency?
• Do the executive management support the proposed project? Do the future users of the system need it?
• Do we need to include the users of the system to include in planning from the beginning?
• Will the new system require user training once the system is released for beta testing? Do we have the necessary resources to conduct such training?
• Do we need to consider any legal issues associated with proposed project?

Economic Feasibility:

Economic feasibility needs to find out if the benefits of the proposed project brings in more than the cost of development and ownership (TCO). The questions which we answer in economic part of study are the following:

• Software, licenses and development cost if any
• Hardware and network
• Consulting expenses
• Employees time cost
• Training cost
• The cost the company pay for not launching the proposed project

Technical Feasibility:

Technical part of feasibility study needs to answer on the following questions:

• Do we have the necessary domain expertise and knowledge?
• Does the proposed technology platform satisfy the company plans for future expansion and if it's scalable enough to accomodate the potential growth?
• Do we have the required for project resources as hardware, network and software?

Schedule Feasibility:

In this part of feasibility study of offshore outsourcing project we need to consider the development time and costs.  The questions we ask here are the following:

• Did we establish the project release time?
• Will speeding up the project release time involves significant risks or make the project much more expensive?
• Do we have control over the factors that affect the project execution and schedule?