Offshore versus agile

Ecris le 19 juin 2005
Dans la catégorie Uncategorized |

It happens sometime that one of my customer ask me about offshore development. When such question comes, I ask “why do you want to offshore this?” and the answer is always the same: for the price. Not for quality, not for innovation, not to improve the company products: it is just to cut the cost.

Suppose you have a project to develop, and the cost estimation is 1000, but your budget is 200. You have two solutions:

Try to go offshore to enter into the budget
Try to identify a 200 subpart of your 1000 project which will create value.

For sure, the offshore path is the easiest one when you don’t understand why the project has been initiated, and where the difficulties are: “Somebody told me it cost 1000, let put it where somebody will accept to do it for 200″. If you are in this situation, my advice is to seek for an out-of-the-self software package. Indeed, it will avoid you the difficult taks of understanding the domain, and you will have some sales person to negociate the price with.

The other path is more complex: you have to understand very well your business and where your are going to find this 200 project within the 1000 project that will leverage it. That’s a difficult task, the kind of tasks that make the difference between succeeding companies and the others.

Then, my advice is the following:

If you have no money, and you don’t understand the value and cost of your project, just don’t do it. If you really need this functionality that you don’t understand, prefer a software packages to the risk of going into a project, especially an offshore one.
If you know where the value is, take the best programmers you have around you (not 10000 km away), make them work closer with business people and let them create the future of your company, here and now, for the amount of money you have: that’s what I call the agile way.

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