Modernizing distributed AD with metrics
The debate about sending IT work overseas has moved out of the political arena and turned into economic and structural discussion. This piece from IT News crystallizes that debate by talking about some of the mistakes organizations make outsourcing and some of the common challenges.
Outsourcing typically goes wrong when delays occur, you get poor-quality programming, and support and operational costs increase. These problems crop up when there’s a lack of skills, planning or infrastructure to manage the outsourcing relationship.
This paragraph in particular stood out:
“Most companies looking to outsourcing or distributed development continue to have unrealistic expectations or insufficient processes and infrastructure to adapt to this new development paradigm. Many simply adopt inefficient manual processes (e.g. more meetings, more travel) to manage the challenges of distribution, or turn away from the problem altogether, unable to see a viable, short-term solution to solve the pains of distributed development.”
That’s important because it gets to the heart of the issue: innovation.
6th Sense’s hosted an online debate this week on building software in a flat world. Among the points raised… the need to innovate and add modern practices to a discipline that’s hardly changed for decades.
Metrics are a vital component of any modern process because they help you establish a real-world infrastructure to manage outsourced projects. Metrics that are captured at the developers’ desktop in particular are the key to progress. They let you know what’s really going, so you can conduct due diligence on your current infrastructure and establish metrics to manage the new relationship.
As Delphi Group founder and Smartsourcing author Thomas Koulopoulos said during our web cast, these are early days for taking this modern approach, but things are clearly changing. Koulopoulos characterized it as the birth of printing: “We are at the very beginning of making a true science of application development and automation technology. We like to think we are much further along - [however] we are at the stage where Gutenberg invented the press rather then Heidelberg mass presses,” Koulopoulos said. Bring on the industrial revolution.
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