In today’s digital age, outsourcing software development has become prevalent worldwide. Its increasing popularity is mainly brought by reduced labor expenses between service providers in different countries.
Notably, in recent years, a different labor cost does not necessarily mean getting a poor level of skills or expertise. Many organizations are fully aware of this working environment as a means to attain quality work at a cheaper cost.
Below are some insights regarding what cultural differences are all about. This article involves how to surpass the challenges or mitigate them to build a conducive working environment for the employees.
Most of these learnings are very helpful for many startups or firms seeking to outsource their product development and to companies who are currently working with a distributed team and still wanting to enable the collaboration more cost-effective.
Software development offshoring
At present, there is a diverse geography of software development outsourcing. Aside from the cost element, enterprises today take into account the skills and expertise of the personnel in the countries they want to outsource services.
Based on statistics, India is considered a top-ranking offshore outsourcing nation because of its financial attractiveness and professional experience. However, there are also quite other countries that can provide quality software development services at an affordable cost in Asia and European countries.
A vital outsourcing component
Cost and skill elements are essential when outsourcing. However, cultural fit is another critical factor to consider in business planning when outsourcing product development. This component should never be neglected.
In general, cultural differences have an impact on product development such as subordination and reporting, task assignments, making a decision, and defining a completed task.
Also, specific cultural differences may lead to varying views of the target audience or visual product components. This is why cultural differences should be taken into account while planning offshore software development.
Outsourcing models
With regard to your project-specific details, there could be different applicable situations for potential collaboration:
- The entire product development is being outsourced without any in-house development team.
- The product development can be partly outsourced with the presence of in-house team tasked to do most of the development tasks.
- Developers are hired using the expertise to work with the team and take the required jobs for the existing project.
In the first scenario, you can achieve the highest cost saving. For this case, you do not need to provide any in-house development infrastructure. Also, you have the entire team with established regulations and workflow processes. This may turn out as a quick solution from the cultural point of view. It is where you do not have to think about organizing a team-building or settle differences among team members.
When partly outsourcing your product development process, for instance, you need to hire a graphic designer or several experts for particular projects. Also, you have to consider closely cultural differences when seeking the services of other cultural communities.
Whatever the case may be, there are best practices that are highly advised to achieve optimum performance of your distributed group.
