When the Contractors Leave
When you outsource project development, there are a lot of advantages to be had. You take the stress of sudden high profile projects that can drain your ongoing staff and you put that work on an outside agency. You isolate the costs to an outsourcing fee and not to expanding the staff. But if the contractor is skilled and comes with a good resume or work, you will receive a quality product when the project is complete.
However, any new software development that is done for your company is going to have some long term issues that need to be anticipated. If the project is for an internal system, there are maintenance and support issues with any software package that may fall to your staff personnel when the contractors leave. Moreover, there are invariably bugs and flaws in any new software package that you need some resource for ironing out as the software that was developed out of house begins to undergo daily use.
These issues can continue to be a concern even if the software project is a product or part of your web presence. When you sell the software you had developed, the need to address flaws and to have qualified support personnel ready to back up that product is crucial to your customer relationships. So some planning must be done during and even before you enter into an outsourcing agreement so there is a smooth transition and ongoing support after the project is declared officially “finished”.
Much can be done to smooth the transition from an outsourced project to one that is “owned” by the company and supported by internal IT in the documentation stage. Stipulate in the contract with your outsourcing company that there will be complete technical documentation which is to include user guides, help files and detailed technical documents describing the organization of the data base, any routine maintenance that will have to be done and the internal components and the system design of the software itself.
Also make sure you walk away from a contractor relationship with complete and exclusive ownership over the source code of the software. You do want your external contracting company to retain copies of the software and source code so you have them to call upon in the event of a disaster or emergency. But that software must be protected by nondisclosure and non-compete agreements so it is understood that you as the sponsor of the project retain ownership over the intellectual property represented by the software you had developed for you.
At the end of the project, there should also be a series of “legacy meetings” in which the intellectual and technical knowledge about the internals of the software are transferred to the on staff people who will be charged with maintenance and ongoing support. Because the company that oversaw the outsourcing of the project will want to sustain a long term relationship with you, language should exist within the original contract that there will be ongoing support after the project is signed off. That may call for you to provide a budget for long term support of the work but that is worthwhile insurance to have a resource your internal developers and technical talent can turn to if there is a crucial problem with the software that needs high priority attention.
A good software contractor will stand behind their work. By making sure their guarantee of the quality of their product is backed up, make sure there are agreements in place to bring them back into the loop if the need arises. It will give you confidence that the software is reliable and give your staff and the business management peace of mind as well knowing that resources are place to keep mission critical software functioning for a long time to come.
