How to Be Lean With Outsourcing

Having a lean IT operation is about understanding your needs and the tools available to you, and acting accordingly.

The business and labor market ecosystem is in a state of constant flux. New technologies have made it easier than ever to communicate with remote teams, making IT outsourcing an obvious choice for many companies looking to expand or improve their IT assets.

However, one of the main worries that businesses have with outsourcing their IT work is that they are going to run into problems once a project has wrapped up, and are going to have difficulty responding rapidly and effectively to any problems their customers or partners might encounter.

In other words, the idea is that being lean can have its advantages, but having an IT team in-house outweighs the benefits.

In this article, we are going to explain why this view is generally flawed, and the worry is misplaced. By taking the right approach to your outsourcing, you can allow your business to be lean, responsive and effective. We are even going to go so far as to say that in order to be lean, you need to be outsourcing your IT development.

Step 1: Understand Your Needs

In an ideal world, everyone who runs or wants to start their own business will have the development skills to create their own web application, internal IT systems and carry out necessary maintenance and expansion projects.

However, in reality, that is very rarely the case, and even if it was, would probably not be practical. IT operations are a component of your business that is essential, but are not what you want to be spending most of your time on.

Understanding your IT needs should be split into two groups: short term and long term.

Short term needs are creating (or fixing) your IT infrastructure and systems.

Your long term needs are the maintenance, expansion, upgrades and client/customer-centric responsiveness that you predict will be required to ensure an optimum provision of your products and services.

Once you understand these needs, you will know what you require from the IT partner you choose. Which takes us to the next step.

Step 2: Finding the Right IT Partner

The most important recommendation we can give to anyone looking for IT specialists to enhance their digital capabilities is to ensure that the candidates are willing to truly understand your needs, and to be prepared to enter into a working arrangement that fulfills those needs.

There is no point in outsourcing IT development to a team that is not going to adapt to your specific targets and timeframes, as this defeats the purpose and negates the advantages of achieving lean operation through outsourcing. You need to be able to define the specific work required, and to design your contracts accordingly.  

Bocasay’s IT DevOps teams in Madagascar, Mauritius and Vietnam all work with the Agile and Lean methodologies with Continuous Improvement at the core of our approach. This allows us to systematically optimize our approach to our clients’ projects, so that we can offer the most lean solutions possible when dealing with both the short term and long term aspects of your IT objectives. This ends up saving everyone time and money.

Step 3: Establish a Workflow that Works

One of the major downsides of having an in-house IT team or manager is that there is the potential for a lot of idle time. This has two negative effects: projects take longer to be completed, as they are time rather than task-based, and can also act as an unnecessary drain on a companies’ resources, as it will need to accommodate full-time IT employees.

One of the major benefits of outsourcing IT operations to an external team is that you can define the workflow that suits you best, and can take advantage of freeing up your own resources to focus on your business, and approaches such as Time Zone Management. When you outsource, you hire skills, not employees, and this provides the flexibility to choose from a wider pool of skillsets, reach goals faster, and pay only for what you actually need.

Do you have an IT project that you think can be taken to the next level by outsourcing? Get in touch to find out how Bocasay can be your trusted IT partner.