Five tips for successful nearshoring

Cost-efficient software development at the highest quality level

Especially in difficult economic times, companies face the challenge of investing in business applications and IT infrastructures in spite of reduced IT budgets in order to remain competitive. Nearshore Development enables significant cost savings and high transparency in the implementation of IT projects.

Nearshore software development can bring significant savings. However, such projects only work under certain conditions.

In tough economic times, companies need to drive investment in business applications and IT infrastructures, despite cut IT budgets, to stay competitive. Anyone who relocates their software development to a low-wage country can better master this challenge, say the experts at the Munich based Softcon IT-Service GmbH  According to their experience, the costs of IT projects can be reduced by up to 25 percent compared to conventional project execution by means of nearshoring and transparency can be increased. However, this requires that the nearshore provider heed the following points:

1. On-site startup phase: Conceptual design, design, implementation, and documentation should be done at the customer site to ensure full control of the project. The contact persons should always be close to the customer and quickly available.
2. Developer pool with industry know-how: For the purpose of quality assurance and to guarantee continuity, it is recommended to use a well-rehearsed specialist team, which has customer-specific know-how.
3. Joint project teams: The project teams should be made up of specialists at the customer site as well as employees of the nearshore development center. This ensures that the customer is provided with technical and technical support by both sub-teams. For the project language, he should be able to choose between German and English. Not only the concept and analysis phase and support should be close to the customer. Even a constantly available contact person should be the interface to the client on site. In this way, the use of nearshore resources remains invisible to the customer and saves him the additional control of a separate team.
4. Continuous project consolidation and tool-based communication: The specialists at the customer site and the nearshore team have to coordinate continuously in the course of the project consolidation in order to be able to guarantee the customer the adherence to deadlines and costs. Communication within the team should be done in real time via instant messaging applications. The use of a wiki server ensures constant up-to-date availability of all project-relevant information that the members of the project team can access at any time.
5. Quality assurance of the development results: Within the framework of a defined and documented development process, the project management on site should continuously ensure the quality of the results. This makes the entire development process transparent for the customer.