icon/copy-url

favicon-32x32

logo-2x

IT Consulting | Outsourcing | Vietnam

One of the most important steps to growing your business while saving money is through strategic outsourcing. There are many different advantages to IT outsourcing, however, you can only reap these benefits when doing it right. Just like with any process, you’ll need to be aware of IT outsourcing mistakes to avoid any issues that delay your search in finding the right team.

Remember, outsourcing an IT partner isn’t only about hiring the first company you see. One can commit costly mistakes if they don’t outsource to the right partner or communicate! 

Not to worry, as such mistakes are easy to spot and avoid. The key is to be aware of what they are. So, read on to discover the top IT outsourcing mistakes and what you can do to keep them from happening, or how to navigate around them.
<br />

## Common IT Outsourcing Mistakes to Avoid

 ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/innomizetech/image/upload/v1703836204/production/image_3b1c60bda9.png) 

Whether you are looking for an IT outsourcing provider or have already partnered up with one, you must understand the potential pitfalls to keep them from hampering your company’s goals and overall success.

Take note of these IT outsourcing mistakes to avoid:

#### 1. You Didn’t Assess Your Needs or Budget

Outsourcing brings numerous benefits including time and cost savings, but that’s only if you already have a solid game plan that includes your IT partner’s tasks and responsibilities.

Outsourcing isn’t just about delegating random tasks, as this can be counterproductive and lead to losing money in the long run. One mistake companies tend to make is the way they hire an IT partner before they even know what they need an outsourcing team for. 

Instead of doing this, you must focus on outsourcing processes and tasks that will yield the best results according to your specific needs and requirements.

You can do this by first evaluating your needs before you even choose to hire an IT partner. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

- Does the company have the bandwidth for outsourcing?
- What parts of the business will I need to outsource? Will I need an IT partner for a certain project or will I need a long-term collaboration for the company as a whole?
- What are the company’s capacities when it comes to the budget?
- How will I integrate the outsourced team into the company?

Not only will these questions help you determine your budget and the services of your IT partner, but they can also help you choose the best company to work with.

#### 2. Misunderstanding the IT Partner’s Role

When thinking about outsourcing, what do you first think of? Some people think of IT partners as a distant company that silently handles tasks you delegate.

However, an outsourcing team does way more than that! They don’t just perform tasks you order them to do - they will become an extension of the company, and essentially, your partner to help you scale and meet goals, may it be for a project or other long-term tasks. 

Unfortunately, not many businesses see it this way just yet. Instead, they tend to misunderstand what an IT partner is and treat them as a money-saving tool instead of a partner they can collaborate with.

The result? Disappointment and ineffective collaboration ultimately lead to businesses not taking full advantage of what the provider offers. You end up losing time, money, and the potential to reach goals!

Fortunately. There are various ways to avoid such misunderstandings, starting by seeing your IT partner from a wider perspective:

- Strategic Perspective: Outsourcing isn’t used only to save money. View outsourcing as a necessary element of a business strategy, which can help with the success of your partnership.
- Understand the Role: Again, an IT partner, or any outsourcing provider for that matter, will offer more than just an additional set of hands. They will bring their skills, experience, and new ideas to the table, making them potentially valuable to the business.
- Proper Communication: Hold regular meetings and proper communication with your IT partner, which will help both of you understand business goals, objectives, expectations, and how to move forward. 
- Give More Time: Spend more time learning about the role an outsourcing provider can offer. Being more involved during the kick off process will make a huge difference.

#### 3. Choosing the Wrong Partner

Mistakes can happen even before choosing an outsourcing provider! When hiring an IT partner, the cheapest option isn’t always the best. Choosing the wrong partner only based on their rates can lead to project mistakes, delays, bad quality, bad communication and investment losses in the long term.

The “wrong” outsourcing provider may not understand your business, won’t be able to perform well according to your expectations, or lack the skills and experience you need.

How do you avoid mistakes like these? Here are the basic things you must know about choosing the right outsourcing provider:

- Skills and experience: Research if the IT partner has completed similar projects as yours, and if they offer the skills, expertise, and tech stack required. You can learn more about this through their website or getting past customer reviews and case studies.
- Cultural compatibility: You may consider getting an IT partner from another country, which is why you need one that aligns with your cultural values, communication styles, as well as your time zone. This will ensure smoother integration and partnership.
- Flexibility: A great provider must know how to adjust to the company’s ever-changing needs proactively. Besides that, they should be ready to scale up or down, according to your company’s needs.
- Quality over cost: While you must have considered outsourcing for cost savings, never sacrifice quality! It’s best to achieve a balance of quality and price, looking at other factors rather than merely getting the one with the most affordable quotations.
- Research: Avoiding research is one of the top mistakes companies make when outsourcing. Do not choose the first company you see, you must have prospects to determine if their rates match the quality of service they deliver.

#### 4. You Don’t Set Expectations Clearly

No matter your business size, you must set clear expectations. It’s one of the crucial parts of any outsourcing strategy. If you don’t communicate expectations, you may end up experiencing inefficiency, poor results, confusion, and even project failure. All these can result in jeopardizing your company’s operations.

The basic rule here is to stop the overestimation of expectations without communicating them with your IT partner. It all starts with effective communication, and here are some tips to help you out:

- Define your goals: From the very beginning, you must have goals already set in place and agreed upon within the company. Determine what your final deliverable looks like, the timeline, as well as how your project aligns with your company goals. 
- Communicate: Don’t just tell the outsourcing provider what to do one time, only to leave them alone to do the work for the duration of your contract. You must always have open communication by scheduling frequent meetings. This will ensure you are updated with the project's progress and discover potential problems to resolve before they worsen.
- Provide detailed guidelines: It’s best to provide as much relevant information as possible when communicating guidelines with your chosen IT partner. Detailed guidelines will help the outsourcing provider understand what your expectations are, rather than leaving them without guidance. 
- Set proper performance metrics: Plan out how to measure success and make sure the metrics you will use are quantifiable and discussed with your in-house team and the IT partner.

#### 5. Lack of Communication
Communication is crucial in every relationship, from personal to professional. Effective communication, especially when dealing with virtual teams, will be a challenge but is not impossible.

However, most businesses tend to overlook the importance of communication, which leads to delays, misunderstandings, and even project failure! To keep that from happening, follow these tips:

- Regular communication: Set regular meetings frequently to discuss the current project progress, ensuring that everyone connected with the project is looped in. Doing so will keep the relevant people on track, as well as allow for adjustments and feedback to be discussed and implemented right away.
- Clear messages: Make sure that all instructions, guidelines, and expectations will be communicated well. Avoid using niche terms or jargon that can easily be lost in translation.
- Feedback: Communication must be a two-way street. Open the conversation for your IT partner to ask questions and offer suggestions rather than closing them off. Remember, they can provide fresh perspectives that can improve the project's progress or overall business operations! Being more open to feedback will help build a positive professional relationship, thus increasing the chance of success.
- Utilize technology: Technology has greatly improved in the past years, making it easier to communicate with people all over the world, regardless of the time and place. Take advantage of these communication tools, using platforms that both your employees and the outsourced team can access and use easily. May it be email, project management platforms, or video conferencing apps, agree on the software you plan to use to message and hold meetings.

#### 6. Giving Different Treatments
Do you see an IT partner as an auxiliary unit or an important element of the business? Your answer can make or break your business’ success when it comes to outsourcing! 

Unfortunately, companies make the common mistake of seeing their IT partners differently compared to their in-house employees, which ends up with them experiencing a disconnect. This disconnect can lead to miscommunication, misunderstandings, and poor performance and results, in the long run.

It’s easy to fall into this mistake since most entrepreneurs are focusing more on functions that must be outsourced and the money they can save. Yes, these are important factors to consider, but it’s just as important to ensure your IT partner feels like they are part of the company. The sense of belonging improves their productivity and motivation in the long term.

To help give your offshore team the proper treatment and equality as your in-house team, here are a few tips to follow: 

- Communication inclusion: Include your IT partner in discussions, meetings, and when it comes to decision-making. Not only will this help your business operations, but it will make the team feel more valued.
- Company culture: Put in more effort to extend the company culture to the IT partner, which can be done through training, team-building sessions, or even just updating them about the company events and achievements.
- Mutual respect: Treat the IT partner with the same respect as the in-house team. After all, they are also just as crucial to the business’ success!
- Provide feedback: Just like you would with your in-house team, provide constructive feedback to the outsourced team regularly. 

#### 7. You Manage the Project Poorly

Again, outsourcing doesn’t only involve telling people what to do and expecting them to do it right throughout the contract. You must also effectively manage the outsourced team and be more involved with them the entire time. 

Being a great leader for your outsourced team will ensure that the project will be accomplished, within the timeline, and budget. However, some companies fail to manage effectively, which leads to preventable issues.

Some of the common instances of mismanagement include:

- Assuming after outsourcing the task or project, you aren’t responsible for it anymore
- Ignoring or not doing regular discussions
- Not allocating resources adequately

Such forms of mismanagement can result in lower-quality work, delayed deliverables, or wasted resources. To keep this from happening, follow these tips: 

- Hire a project manager: If you can’t manage a project yourself, assign someone from your in-house team to help out. Your dedicated project manager will be responsible for tracking progress, managing the resources, and acting as the liaison between the in-house employees and the IT partner. Make sure that the project manager you hire deeply understands the project, timeline, and expected results.
- Regular meetings: Set regular meetings to make sure that the project or outsourced functions are done within the timeline. Doing so will keep everyone updated on the progress while preventing potential issues.
- Clearly define the deliverables: Just like communicating expectations, make sure that you set well-defined and quantifiable deliverables. Doing so will give the IT partner a clearer idea of what they need to do, and it will also help measure their performance properly.
- Manage resources well: Make sure you allocate adequate resources, from time to tools, when facilitating your project. Sure, you want to save money, but it’s important to balance resource availability with cost-effectiveness to gain the best results.

#### 8. You Don’t Consider the Cultural Differences

A huge advantage of outsourcing is that you can choose an IT partner from a whole different part of the world. The diversity is enriching, but it does pose a few issues in outsourcing, especially amid cultural differences, time zones, values, and the like.

Ignoring cultural differences can result in conflicts and misunderstandings throughout the partnership, which you can avoid through these tips:

- Offer cultural sensitivity training: Set cultural sensitivity training sessions for the in-house employees before introducing them to the outsourced team. This will help your employees understand and respect any cultural differences, which sets a great beginning for a new partnership.
- Have open communication: There must be an open dialogue about cultural differences between your in-house and outsourced teams. In case you, your team, or the outsourced team don’t understand something, feel free to ask or clarify. Discuss anything that may feel unclear, so there won’t be room for misunderstandings and errors.
- Be flexible: Adapt a more flexible management method to adjust to the different cultures. Showing more respect for the IT partner’s culture will make them feel more valued and respected, thus boosting their morale, thus improving their work ethics.
- Be patient and understanding: Don’t expect both your company and the dedicated team to adjust to the differences immediately. Cultural understanding will take time for both parties. Be more patient and positive throughout the partnership even during the small obstacles, and you’ll soon witness a great partnership arise. 

#### 9. Jumping in the Outsourcing Wagon Quickly
We all know how exciting it is to potentially save money and offload tasks for you to focus on your core business functions. However, diving into the world of outsourcing too quickly can lead to your downfall. 

When you don’t understand the complexities of an outsourcing partnership and go all in, you may end up with an IT partner with little to no understanding of what they’re supposed to do and how they can help you achieve company success. 

Avoid making this mistake by learning more about what outsourcing entails! Here are a couple of tips to help you out:

- Begin with low-volume projects or tasks first and test the waters with outsourcing. You may consider hiring one or two outsourced team members to discover if outsourcing is the right direction.
- Wait it out and take your time when outsourcing, paying attention to the feedback you receive from your in-house employees and customers. This will help you determine whether or not you should outsource more functions, and exactly what tasks you should offload to your IT partner in the future.
- Define the terms of the partnership before you hire the first outsourcing provider you see. Your chosen IT partner should have a similar vision and values and offer a written contract to ensure that everything is agreed upon and stated in writing, avoiding any conflicts.

#### 10. You Outsource the Important Stuff
It’s crucial to understand your core business functions, as this will help you determine what tasks to outsource. 

If you aren’t knowledgeable about core business functions, these are activities central to the business’ value proposition, and what will differentiate your company from the competition. These are closely associated with the business’s core competencies and values. 

As one might assume, these functions are extremely important for the company’s success and must be taken seriously, compared to other tasks and projects. However, many companies tend to outsource core business, resulting in losing control over the quality of business operations, along with the unique value of your company.

The question is: What should you be outsourcing and what should you keep for the in-house team to perform? Here are ways to determine that:

- Identify strengths: Determine the things your company does best and how you stand out among the competition. These functions you should keep in-house.
- Determine the costs and benefits: Measure the costs and demands of assigning non-core functions to your employees versus outsourcing them to your IT partner. Besides that, consider other factors like the efficiency, speed, and skill level necessary to perform the functions.
- Control and quality: In case the task or project requires a higher level of control for quality results, or if it involves extremely confidential information, it’s best to have your in-house team take care of it.

<br />

## Avoid These Mistakes and Get the Right Partner

It is anticipated that the awareness of these IT outsourcing mistakes will serve to safeguard the company against potential impediments and pitfalls that may have adverse consequences on its operations over an extended period.

For those still looking for the best IT partner to work with. Look no further than here at [INNOMIZE](https://innomizetech.com/), where we ensure clear communication and expectations. With our team of highly trained and efficient IT talents, we’ll be able to provide all the tools and skills you need for project success. 

What are you waiting for? Let’s discuss your project and explore how INNOMIZE can bring its expertise to scale your business!


