Outsource Optimization

Maximizing the quality and agility of key IT partnerships.

Outsourced IT functions offer the potential to deliver significant competitive advantages and cost savings to many organizations. However, outsourcing test and delivery functions can also introduce significant risks which can quickly outweigh initial cost saving benefits. Outsource partners, and distributed development teams in general, need an IT infrastructure in place to help reduce those risks and better manage quality across the software lifecycle.

Effective tools and processes can help companies navigate the risks of collaborative test and development activities across globally distributed IT teams. This includes maximizing the productivity of each participant and assuring that their deliverables meet the larger functional requirements of a complex, distributed system. By embedding effective quality practices into the software lifecycle, organization can realize the intended benefits of their IT outsourcing efforts without incurring additional risk.

Common IT outsourcing challenges include:

• Managing accountability for software quality becomes more difficult as more organizations and teams are involved in a project. Greater accountability and visibility is needed for shared deliverables across the delivery lifecycle to quickly expose communication breakdowns and identify problems early.
• Dependency on unavailable or inaccessible systems constrains the productivity of interdependent teams, increasing contention for shared resources and introducing scheduling delays and project risks
• High costs can be incurred when creating separate test environments for different distributed teams including hardware infrastructure costs, licensing costs, and maintenance and configuration costs

The Solution

LISA provides test, validation and virtualization capabilities to better manage accountability and quality across distributed teams while eliminating the dependencies and constraints that restrict the agility and productivity of these teams. ITKO's LISA product suite provides:

• A collaborative testing environment that directly verifies all technology layers with a high level of automation, so that teams can better meet defined requirements at lower cost
• Continuous software validation so that stakeholders can be assured that each software component supports all upstream and downstream dependencies in an auditable form.
• Virtualized test environment, which simulates the behavior of the highly interdependent and critical systems that teams must build and test against, even when they may not have access to live or completed systems.

A partnership with outsource providers based on shared objectives for collaborative quality are far more likely to deliver the benefits and results expected. Success depends upon a combination of people, processes and enabling technology to foster greater productivity, agility and quality across distributed teams.

The benefits of implementing these capabilities are not limited to outsourced IT providers, but are applicable to any distributed development or testing environment consisting of multiple teams, whether offshore, on-shore, or in-house. Similarly, these capabilities can deliver greater value across the software development lifecycle, with benefits increasing as collaboration is promoted between development, QA, business analysts, and other stakeholders in the software delivery process.