High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
1
Choosing the Right Offshore Partnera decision making methodology
By Paul Klipp
Choosing an offshoresoftware vendor is a difficult task.There are countless optionssuited to very different types of projects, needs and relationships.The costs range fromastronomically high toimpossibly low. Between you andthe right vendor lies a fog of doubt created by (mostly true)horror stories of projects runamok. Pressing you forward isthe hope that you could be onthe verge of creating one of those (very real) dreamrelationships with a vendor thatwill make you the hero of yourcompany or clients. What I amgoing to elaborate on in thisarticle is the decision-making technique that I was taught inmy MBA program so many yearsago at the University of Illinois.The course was titled “DecisionMaking Under Uncertainty” andits principles are very applicableto the task of choosing anoffshore software developmentpartner.By creating a layer of abstraction between yourself andthe options and populating thatabstraction layer with objectivecriteria, you can then view youroptions through the clarifying filter of your priorities. Okay,that might sound a littlecomplicated. Basically what I amsuggesting is that when facedwith a decision that involves toomany criteria to easily process in your head, a methodical and,equally importantly, a defensibleand documented approach ismore reasonable.Most people make decisionsbased upon an evaluation of theoptions using some set of criteriathat is meaningful to them. Thisapproach is based on theassumption that the decisioncriteria are well known and canbe matched easily against theperformance features of theoptions. However, when thereare many decision criteria and alarge range of variabilitybetween options, this approachbecomes very confusing anddifficult to justify.I suggest you begin thedecision process by looking
This article wasoriginally published onConfessions of an Agile Activist
AGILE
ACTIVIST.COM
M a y 2 1 , 2 0 0 7
2
carefully at your evaluation criteria. When seeking a software vendor, the criteria may be:PriceCultural fitTechnical competenciesTimely deliveryReliable processEase of communicationNext, decide how important each of these is to you. Some people advise ranking them. I disagree.In a list of ten items, ranking implies that item 2 is ten percent less important than item 1. To allow yourself more flexibility to express your true feelings about the relative importance of each criterion, Irecommend taking a number and dividing it among the criteria. It doesn’t matter which number youuse. I’ll use 50.Price
10Cultural fit
5Technical Competencies
15Timely delivery
25Reliable process
20Ease of communication
20Oops, I ended up with a total of 95 and yet I am happy with the distribution. That’s not aproblem. All we want is relative weighting and we get that by dividing each weight by the sum of allweights.Price
,105 Accessibility
,053Technical Competencies
,158Timely delivery
,272Reliable process
,211Ease of communication
,211I rounded so they don’t add to exactly 1, but your spreadsheet won’t round. Check your formulaby making sure that the sum of the weighting numbers is one. Are you starting so see the power of this method? You now know what you’re looking for. Thenext step is to look at options and see how they measure up.For each option, rate them. Think about how each vendor rates on each criterion. Again, use anyscale you want, just so long as higher is better.
PriceAccessibilityCompetency
DynaSoft
134
ITindia
223
Software.ru
541Next, you need to normalize your rankings. We do this the same way that we normalized thedecision criteria. Assign to each vendor a value for each criterion that is equal to that criterion’s
Choosing the Right Offshore Partnera decision making methodology
By Paul Klipp
A G I L E
A C T I V I S T
M a y 2 1 , 2 0 0 7
Add a Comment