Josh Folgado

Outsourcing is the practice of paying an outside company to develop a program instead of developing it in-house.

Outsourcing companies can have more experience in an application area, more developers available to work at a given time and a larger library of reusable code to draw from.

The combination can result in a dramatic reduction in the time needed to deploy a new product. In some instances, Outsourcing can save development cost too.

Efficacy

• Potential reduction from nominal schedule: Excellent

• Improvement in progress visibility:  None
  

• Effect on schedule risk:  Increased Risk

• Chance of first-time success:  Good

• Chance of long-term success:  Very Good
  

Major Risks

• Transfer of expertise outside the company
• Loss of control over future development
• Compromise of confidential information
• Loss of progress visibility and control

Major Interaction and Trade-Offs

• Trades loss of control and reduced in-house development capacity for improved development speed or reduced cost or both