This type of arrangement can vary from a straightforward staff augmentation model of a few developers to a complex and sophisticated business solution that your entire business depends on. In either case, you’ll likely have some apprehensions, the main concern being: will you get the value you expect for the money you pay?
Some other common IT outsourcing concerns you may have, include:
- Are there other IT or software development outsourcing vendors with better cost/value ratio?
- Is the outsourcing provider really as experienced as they claim to be? (e.g. How do they operate? What are their processes?)
- Do they really possess the required skills to execute your project on time with the level of quality you require?
- Will they provide the best technical solution for your business, one that truly helps you meet your business goals, stay competitive, and innovate?
- Will they keep the project on track (meet deadlines) and on target (stay within budget)?
- Will the communication be difficult with an offshore/nearshore outsourcing provider?
In summary, your concerns are mostly around trust in outsourcing relationships. So, how can you build trust with a new IT outsourcing vendor? And how can you build it quickly and with minimal effort?
As an experienced, global IT outsourcing provider, this is precisely what we strive to achieve at TEAM International with our existing and potential clients. For each new client engagement, we implement a comprehensive presale process. This structured approach is aimed at building healthy, long-lasting relationships with our clients and providing them with the most effective IT and software development solutions possible.
What does our presale process involve?
1. Understand your business and technical needs
Our sales team communicates with you to clearly understand both your business and technical needs, constraints, and concerns. With this information, we create a detailed and comprehensive customer profile that will be used to develop a customized solution to meet your needs.
2. Develop a customized IT outsourcing solution
We then put together a team of technical experts to design a customized IT outsourcing solution for your business. This team will consist of various professionals depending on your needs.
For example, if you have a need to transform a legacy system into a cloud-based solution, accompanied by architectural changes and a number of additional features, the team will include a delivery manager, business analyst, software architect, and a quality control engineer. The presale team also involves our legal, IT, and recruitment experts to ensure full alignment.
3. Deep-dive discovery phase (optional)
If your project is larger and more complex than most and requires more in-depth analysis to determine the correct solution, we recommend implementing a deep-dive discovery phase. This phase typically takes up to several weeks depending on the size and scope of the assessment and works best when members of our team travel to work with you onsite. This phase allows us to gain a deep understanding of your current system and business processes and provides us with the information necessary to design the best solution for your business.
Once completed, we’ll provide you with thorough documentation on your current and proposed future systems architecture, functional requirements, and full details on the proposed solution. In the long run, this in-depth discovery helps to ensure your customized solution offers maximum ROI and helps you avoid the risks of spending time, effort, and resources on misguided initiatives.
4. Present your detailed implementation and operations plan
At this stage and throughout the presale process, you will be provided with a transparent view of how TEAM operates. This includes detailed documentation, face-to-face meetings with our business and technical leaders, as well as interactive presentations on who we are as a company, what values we uphold, in addition to specific implementation and operations plans for your project. These plans will detail how the delivery processes will work, how account management will be structured, how we will communicate with you, and what types of infrastructure and information security will support your project.
The Bottom Line
Our presale process allows us to gain a deep understanding of your business needs and goals, which ultimately, is the base of any successful business or technical endeavor. With this knowledge, we take the time and assign expert resources to design a customized IT and/or software development outsourcing solution to help your business grow, innovate, and maintain a competitive edge – all in the fastest and most cost-effective way possible.
Ultimately, the presale process is key to helping ensure we build trust in outsourcing relationships quickly and effectively with any organization considering our services. We hope that by reading this blog post about each step in this process, we’ll be able to greatly reduce or even eliminate the main concerns you may have about IT outsourcing with TEAM International.
