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When working with an outsourced project, a project manager (PM) needs to focus on dozens of issues simultaneously. They need to facilitate the project remotely, ensure efficient communication, and keep an eye on project resource use. Headhunting and keeping such an experienced and skilled employee in-house may be challenging and costly, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
Hiring an outsourced PM as part of the development team is a great alternative to establishing in-house project management. An outsourced PM can improve team management, ensure a transparent development process, reduce your budget, and bring many more valuable benefits.
In this article, we showcase the benefits having a PM on the development side brings to a team and share our approach to project management. We also analyze common concerns about outsourcing project management and explain how we address them at Apriorit.
Contents:
Outsourcing project management: 6 concerns and ways to address them
6 advantages of outsourcing project management
Outsourcing software development has become an integral part of IT projects since it provides companies with numerous benefits:
However, not everyone believes that hiring an outsourced project manager along with the development team can bring as many benefits as an in-house project manager. Usually, customers have such concerns of outsourcing project management:
How do we mitigate it? PMs at Apriorit do have more control over the development team than the customer does, which allows them to ensure that developers work to the best of their abilities. However, we always keep our customers updated on the project status and discuss critical decisions (development methodology, choice of technology, sprint goals, etc.) with them. Mostly, our PMs do this by producing daily or weekly status reports, facilitating regular online standups, and writing follow-up emails.
How do we mitigate it? At Apriorit, we have strict internal coding standards that help us build software of the highest quality. Second, during the project discovery phase, our business analysts and PMs elicit customer requirements to define the product’s goals and functionality. Thus, we ensure that the final product will meet all of the customer’s needs, expectations, and standards.
How do we mitigate it? While working on projects, our PMs and developers follow security best practices: they sign non-disclosure agreements, use secure credentials to access customers’ resources, audit the security of data forms and APIs, etc. We can perform a security audit on demand or involve an authorized third-party organization to do so to prove that we’re working to the highest security standards.
How do we mitigate it? At Apriorit, we have extensive experience delivering projects of various sizes to customers in various industries and countries. We generally assign PMs that have relevant knowledge and experience for particular projects. Also, our PMs constantly exchange experience and knowledge, which helps them be prepared for any challenge. If one PM has never worked with a particular type of business, they can always ask for advice from colleagues.
How do we mitigate it? Our PMs negotiate specific time frames and communication channels convenient for both the customer’s team and the outsourced team. Vast experience working with customers from around the world has taught us to be flexible and adapt to any conditions.
How do we mitigate it? In our experience, hiring an outsourced PM saves a project’s budget in the long run. We’ve seen our PMs successfully mitigate risks of miscommunication, unclosed requirement gaps, and insufficient risk analysis. Also, good knowledge of the team allows our PMs to efficiently manage team resources and detect issues faster than a customer’s in-house PMs usually do.
As a software R&D outsourcing company, Apriorit has extensive experience providing project managers to our customers as part of our core offer. We believe that team management on the side of the outsourcing provider is beneficial for both the provider and the customer. Now let’s find out how exactly an outsourced PM can facilitate development.
A project manager is a leader who should be able to prevent, tackle, and resolve any issues without breaking the deadlines. Moreover, as a leader, they play the role of a mentor, teacher, facilitator, and problem-solver for the team.
Our customers give us plenty of positive feedback on the performance of our PMs. Based on their reviews, we can outline these benefits of outsourcing project management as a part of the development team:
On one of our projects, a customer requested hiring more developers to quickly implement a range of additional features. Instead, the PM optimized the workload of the project team and paralleled some of the existing tasks to make sure the team would be able to handle new features without involving additional specialists. In this way, the PM saved the customer’s budget while meeting the deadlines.
To ensure that our customers feel all these advantages of outsourcing project management, our project managers have developed their own approach to handling projects. Let’s see how they do it.
Project managers at Apriorit have created a workflow that allows them to bring any project to a successful conclusion despite its size, industry, and possible challenges.
A PM’s activities start by collecting and estimating software requirements provided by the customer or elicited by a business analyst, then creating a statement of work. This document is a product specification that describes the software functionality and implementation plan that the customer and outsourcing development company have agreed upon. The statement of work is useful for both parties: the customer uses it to understand how the product will be implemented and how it will operate, and the development team uses it to plan how to develop and deliver the product within a specified timeframe.
After that, the PM chooses a development methodology for the project. This choice is based on several factors:
At Apriorit, we prefer to use an Agile methodology for our projects as it allows for more flexibility and earlier delivery compared to other methodologies.
The next step is to choose relevant tools for several areas of the project:
Although we have preferred tools for each PM activity, we always discuss them with the customer and development team to make sure everyone is comfortable with the PM’s choice.
When the most suitable methodology and tools are agreed upon, the PM creates a communication plan that defines:
This document is a must for long projects that involve at least several developers and stakeholders.
It’s also up to a PM to organize cooperation between the customer’s team and Apriorit’s team. We often work on projects with distributed teams, where our developers integrate into or augment the customer’s team. In this case, our PMs pay extra attention to ensuring a smooth flow of information and processing of tasks. To do that, they consult with team leaders, figure out the skillsets of both teams, and distribute tasks according to team members’ skills.
If the project team is distributed between several time zones, it’s up to the PM to plan communication and use the overlapping time in the most efficient manner. In our projects, we arrange meetings to discuss the most important issues that need the customer’s attention. For all other questions, we use emails and status updates that the customer can read any time they want.
Once the cooperation scheme has been discussed and agreed on, the PM creates a project plan. It includes:
When all the preparations are finished and all the documents are signed, the development team starts working. From this point, the PM’s task is to coordinate the project team and control project progress. The PM manages risks during development, identifying and troubleshooting threats before they materialize.
Another important part of the PM’s job is ensuring that the customer receives a high-quality product. In our projects, we start testing products in the early development stages and conduct user acceptance testing when we finish implementing requirements from the specification. A PM coordinates the development and testing teams to make sure they produce software according to the client’s requirements and within schedule.
At Apriorit, PMs always add great value to our dedicated development teams. More than 18 years of experience in outsourcing software development have convinced us and our customers that having a project manager on site with the development team significantly benefits a project.
Experience managing hundreds of projects in many industries and communicating with customers from all over the world helps Apriorit project managers lead any project to success.
Over the years, we’ve formulated our own approach to outsourcing project management as a part of our services. Contact us to get a well-managed and skillful development team for your next project!
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