IT Outsourcing

Outsourcing is strategic decision for any firm. For a firm outsourcing its projects,there are a lot of benefits as well as risk associated with it.

So why so organizations outsource?

Though outsourcing has been mainly associated with the IT industry, it has been practiced in many industries before. If you take an example, many electronic companies in the west outsource to the eastern developing and under developed countries. This is due to the reduced labor charges in these outsourced countries. So in effect the company would be reducing the production cost of their products.

Another reason can be that the outsourced country may have the key resources. For the production of certain types of metals, organisations usually set up the production unit near the source. This is also because of cost consideration, because the company can benefit more from shipping finished or semi processed products rather  than the core materials.

Quality of the resource is another criteria to be considered while outsourcing. One of the main reasons of IT outsourcing to India is a prime example. Thought cost is a consideration now-a-days,it the quality of resource that is important here.

Outsourcing has now take the form of offshore development, in many organisational aspect. 

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Agile software development and change management

Project management of software development projects using agile methodology is very popular. Change management is an important aspect of software development. Changes to the feature or function or even the scope of the project can arise during the course of development. Once the development commences accommodating changes is a difficult task for the development team but if agile methodology is used the confusion can be reduced.

Agile methodology uses iterative development and so there will be a series of development cycles for each project phase. So if a change request is made during the development phase, it can be carefully assessed without interrupting the normal development structure. 

For change requirements to be accepted and implemented, it is incorporated into the process as an iteration and hence the developer is not confused or troubled with the new change. There are several advantages of using agile methodology and that is why it has been incorporated in many of the projects management techniques used.

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