More and more companies are choosing to nearshore their software development teams. Nearshoring is not popular without any reason: there is no lack of highly skilled, professional developers in Eastern Europe. Ukraine, for example, is known for its local development talent. It is less expensive and more efficient to nearshore your IT team. Because of the short travel time of three hours, you can visit often enough to check the progress and you can quickly put together a quality team. What should you look out for when you consider nearshoring a software development team? Below there are five tips to help you get started.
1: Organize a good onboarding process
A collaboration with a nearshoring team starts with a session where the business plan and the IT challenges are central. This lays the foundation for the first sprints (mini-projects in which products or features are delivered) and the planning for these sprints. This is the first specification level of the project.
It is also important that deliverables are agreed upon in this session so that it is clear what can be settled on. In addition, it must be possible to be physically present so that these deliverables can actually be presented. The travel time should, therefore, be reasonable. After all, an appointment on location will prevent misunderstandings.
2: Strive for flexibility
In a collaboration with an IT partner, you want to be flexible in two ways. First of all, if that proves necessary, you want to be able to suspend, reduce or increase cooperation. If a nearshoring party has no faith in his or her service, they often make it impossible (or only possible after a long time) to end a collaboration.
You also want to be flexible within the IT project. If you want to do a pivot or just want to change some features or functionalities, then that must be possible. This may mean that the team must be organized or assembled differently. Discover in advance whether these options are actually available. In fact, it should be possible not to outsource the projects, but to “rent” an IT team. This team will then develop something that is relevant to your market.
3: Retain the rights over intellectual property
Always check in advance whether a development agency requires ownership of the code, rights, or intellectual property. If that is the case, then it is difficult – if not impossible – to transfer a project if the cooperation is disappointing.
As a development agency, we transfer the full code and intellectual property rights if that is what a client wishes. Doing so is more important than you can possibly imagine, please check our recent article on the topic. After all, you want your intellectual property to be safe and not suddenly fall into the hands of the party where you happen to outsource your IT solution. A collaboration should add value, but not cost you the ownership of your idea.
4: Consider a managed project manager for a larger project
There are two ways to organize a nearshoring software development team: managed and non-managed. Non-managed nearshoring is characterized by the hiring of a team of programmers who work remotely. Contrarily, if a team is managed, it means that there is a project manager on site who monitors the progress of the process. He or she facilitates the team during the Agile process. Parties who opt for a traditional Scrum method more often opt for a managed project.
If a project is not that big, then the project manager also plays the role of the product owner. This means that he or she is also involved in the content of the product and is considering the technical description and functional requirements.
5: Outsourcing pays off
If it seems worth considering putting together a team in (for example) Ukraine, you can do this through (e.g.) freelancer websites where talents offer their services. However, you probably underestimate the time and money involved in such a recruitment procedure. If you do not have a good supervisor, you must remain at the relevant nearshore location to check the progress.
Conclusion
At Moqod we fully take care of the process. We put together a development team that can be managed both remotely and on-site. Thus you do not have to invest in recruitment or organize accommodation. A highly experienced team of developers can get started right away within the usual lead time. Teams can always be expanded, reduced, or modified. Moqod coordinates the work via headquarters in the Netherlands so that coordination takes place locally. Quality is guaranteed through independent Quality Assurance.
We see (and hear, through disappointed companies) that organizing nearshoring more often goes wrong than well. This is because certain skills and expertise are involved. If you don’t have that, you are often more expensive, you have no guarantees that the work will actually be done and you cannot manage the team remotely. In short: cheap turns out to be expensive in that case. So trust our professional experience and fully experience the benefits that nearshoring can bring to your company.
