I just finished listening to an excellent 25-minute podcast, "A Software Outsourcing Primer," and I want to recommend it to you. I’m not a podcast freak, nor, for that matter, a particularly easy person to please. My time, like yours, is valuable, and I resent so-called content that’s nothing more than thinly veiled marketing.
Well, so much for context setting. QAPodcast is a relatively new site with a great tagline: "Expert conversations about the poor cousin of the software family." Although it’s sponsored by QA Labs, the largest software QA service provider in Canada, it’s not marketing disguised as case studies. The inaugural podcast, recorded last June, is a conversation about outsourcing between QA Labs’ Wolfgang Strigel and Geoff Flamark of Clarrus Consulting. If you go to the site, you’ll be able to listen to this or any of nine other (so far) podcasts.
Here are some of the tidbits I found interesting:
* You shouldn’t think about outsourcing in terms of cost – it’s really about resource management
* When you outsource offshore, there are subtle cultural disconnects that you may not even think about. Indian firms that are CMM Level 5 certified, Strigel notes, are going to be process-oriented. So what? Well, if flexibility and adaptability are built into your own organization’s DNA, your expectations are likely to clash with a checklist-oriented approach.
* Plan on spending more that it would have cost you to do it yourself on your first one or two outsourcing engagements.
You’ll find excerpts from the podcasts, along with information about the length of the pocasts. Worth your time (and ear). http://www.qapodcast.com/
