Posts Tagged ‘project’

Eight Ways to Ensure Outsourcing Success

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

outsourcing_successOutsourcing isn’t new, but, by now, many IT shops have accumulated enough experience to use this service more effectively. According to Houston-based consultancy TPI, even though the overall outsourcing market is down 13 percent from last year, growth remains strong for U.S.-based contracts.

Certainly, the cost-saving motivation is still significant: The cost for programmers and support services overseas can be less than half of what their domestic equivalents can be. Nevertheless, to achieve those savings, you have to know how to work with the outsourcing vendor.

We spoke with several managers who have used outsourcers to build and augment their systems, and we came away with eight suggestions to help ensure that your next outsourcing contact—and contract—will be successful.

1. Make sure there is a strong cultural fit between your two organizations. This involves both the country of origin of the outsourcer and your own corporate culture. “The Dutch are very direct at telling you when you have done something wrong, but in India, that can backfire and shut things down immediately” says Scott McDonald, the CTO of FCI USA, in Etters, Pa., a manufacturing company with French headquarters that has used a number of outsourcers all over the world.

“The French like to have a lot more interaction than we do, and in Asia they like more structure and to understand the various components of a process. We hired an external consulting firm to help us understand the differences among the various cultures and how we operate.”

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

CRM Software History

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments.

crm-timeline

We’d like to present you a project about the history of CRM: CRM Software History Timeline by Software Advice. The creation of this timeline came about when they were researching the history of CRM and found that there wasn’t really a comprehensive account of the CRM software industry’s history available online. CRM is an established segment of the software industry, having been around for nearly 30 years. Several innovative technologies have arisen from CRM that have changed the way companies conduct business, specifically in sales, marketing and customer service. So, Software Advice wanted to aggregate the information they found into one place to make it available to the general public.

For today the timeline includes 18 key events that have shaped the CRM software industry over the last 30 years. The CRM Software History Timeline is interactive in that people can submit dates and events that they deem to be important in the history of CRM software.

The company Software Advice wants to add another 20 events and dates. May be you can help them with this project?

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Posted in Application development, CRM, Internet, Web, Web development | 3 Comments »

Top5 questions when choosing an outsourcing vendor

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

When customers select an outsourcing partner, they don’t do it blindly but rather make a carefully weighed decision basing on some conclusions. These conclusions are usually made after a vendor answers certain questions. So, here is the list of things companies usually what to know when seeking an outsourcing partner (may be interesting and useful for both parties):

1. Does the service provider have experience in similar projects? Positive and negative experiences are equally useful for making a decision. To learn this customer needs to share relevant information with other organizations.

2. Does the vendor use the quality management system? Since customers are worried about the quality of the end product, this is one of the most important questions for them. The customer might need to give the vendor a personal visit in order to inspect the company.

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Posted in Outsourcing | No Comments »

What is Project Charter Document

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Any of our projects start their life as soon as Softheme’s project manager creates a formal document called the project charter. The latter is a small document prepared to state the project name and the purpose of the project. It should also contain other important project-related information, namely, the business case for doing the project and a rough schedule and budget for the project. Besides, it should describe the needs and expectations of the stakeholders and list the assumptions and constraints that are recognized at the current point in the project.

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Posted in Process, Project management | 1 Comment »

Project Scope Management: Softheme View

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

In the next several posts we would like to discuss the basics of scope management since it is one of the most important parts of project management which we at Softheme pay special attention to. Due to proper application of scope management approaches to the projects of our clients, Softheme is so successful and productive in delivering projects of various complexity levels. So we believe it would be useful to share our experience regarding this matter.

Scope management is a starting point for any project

However, with web being a more dynamic sphere of development, we believe that scope management is better applicable to application development which usually requires a more thorough approach.

It is needless to say that the most common reason behind project failures is poor scope definition. This means that the expectations of the stakeholders, mainly of the client or sponsor, and the expectations of the project team are quite different. Being a most difficult problem, it is nevertheless critical to the success of the project. Projects fail due to many reasons, and understanding them does a good job in helping to avoid failures.

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Posted in Process, Project management, Scope management, Web design | No Comments »
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