The Top 5 Tips for Successfully Managing an IT Outsourcing Relationship

Top 5 Tips to Manage Your Relationship with an IT Outsourcing Company

Outsourcing IT support and services is something that is in trend today. Businesses outsource key services to vendors to avail of the amazing benefits on offer. However, your relationship with the IT outsourcing company must be great in order to maximize these benefits. When you sign yourself up for a partnership with an outsourcing firm, you hand over certain aspects (not core but key) of your business. This is a process based on contract, trust, and an efficient relationship. Communication, complementation, and responsiveness with one another will affect this relationship significantly.

By outsourcing some tasks, you free up your technical staff to handle the core operations that are more vital to your business. According to the statistics, the market size of the outsourcing market doubled between 2000 and 2022. Moreover, the data from a survey tells us that only 78% of organizations are happy about their IT outsourcing relationship. This implies that one in every five organizations comes across challenges in maintaining a healthy relationship with their outsourcing partner. Let us have a look at some tips that will help you to manage an IT Outsourcing Relationship successfully.

Top 5 Tips to Manage Your Relationship with an IT Outsourcing Company

The following are the key tips to follow in order to maintain a good relationship with your outsourcing partner:

1.State your expectations clearly to the IT outsourcing partner

Entering an outsourcing partnership without being clear on what you want to achieve with it, is a bad move. You need to set goals and objectives for your outsourcing services and prioritize them accordingly. Plus, you need to find the right outsourcing partner with the set of skills, knowledge, and expertise to complement your competencies. When you are clear on what your want from the partnership, you can make it clear to your IT outsourcing partner as well. This will help you both work with the same set of objectives to achieve a common goal for your business. For instance, you need to finalize project methodology, deadlines, budgets, and more right in the beginning. This would make things easier for you going forward.

2.Work closely with the service provider

Although the companies associated with outsourcing software development are usually experts at handling their tasks. But you need to understand that every business is different. So are their outsourcing requirements. Therefore, you need to work closely with the service providers to keep them informed on your day-to-day business needs. This will help them to provide you with the best services for your company. You must clearly communicate your goals on a regular basis to make sure that your organization is getting the best service possible. Sharing your business strategy, your plans for future growth, and any current IT weaknesses and competitive threats are all parts of this process.

3.Appoint decision-makers

Once you decide on your goals and objectives to achieve through the outsourcing partnership, you need to act upon them. Go through the experience and know-how of your in-house team and mark the areas where you might have trouble making decisions. Once you figure out all the details about what you want from your product, you need a service provider to follow your directions. However, you need to keep your mind open to any suggestion that the partner has to give you. This will provide you with a scope to learn new things and broaden your horizons. Professionals having relevant knowledge and experience will help you make key decisions to successfully manage your relations with an IT outsourcing company.

4.Be ready to face potential problems related to time zone differences

Most often, the outsourcing partners we choose are in different time zone. This creates problems in establishing a seamless communication line. Frequent and fluent communication with the service provider is necessary in order to make significant decisions with precision. Plus, there are significant chances that along with the time difference, there is a cultural difference between you and your outsourcing team. This will make the maintenance of an efficient partnership even more difficult. Therefore, it is advised to choose an offshore partner with whom you overlap at least 3 hours of working time. Also, look for a partner who is not culturally very different from you. Otherwise, be ready to face the problems that come with time zone and cultural differences.

5. Focus on value instead of cost

Cost-cutting is among the key reasons why businesses choose to outsource their IT services. However, while selecting an IT outsourcing company, you need to focus on the values offered by the service provider rather than blindly going after low cost. Sometimes the lowest-priced option is not the best one to choose. You must select a service provider that proactively brings ongoing value to your business, and actively supports customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

Few Final Words

Along with all the above tips, you need to be ready to embrace the changes that are effective in growing your business. The trends in outsourcing software development are continuously changing. So, you need to follow these trends if you want to present your strong contention in the market competition. Always prepare yourself to adopt the new tools and technologies coming into the mainstream. This will improve your growth rate and productivity.