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I have seen succesful outsourced projects. They were more expensive than hiring local, because they required a massive amount of up-front analysis, requirements definition, design documentation, and involvement from an expensive middle-management tier of analysts. It took understanding that the process was going to be hard and have a lot of iterative rework. It took understanding that communication is hard. Markets clear. If outsourcing were so great, it would have completely taken over by now. It has been tested for decades now and it hasn't. Outsourcing fits really well for organizations that have a lot of explicit, documented, well-understood domain knowledge, for which the org is the key inventor. But that's not most organizations. Most organizations are operating by the seat of their pants, competing in markets where a large number of other orgs know their business. That they turn a profit at all is more a testament to the perseverance of a few, key employees than it is the exceptionalism of the organization itself. Every axis of communication is a potential friction point, be it collocation, industry, experience levels, language, time zone, culture, personality types, etc. The more you can remove those friction points, the more successful your project can be. But outsourcing throws several of those out the window, never to be touched again. So you're left optimizing on the few that are left, where most companies only ever optimized on those axes that have already been removed. |