Finding the Central Source of Truth in Outsourcing
?? Adam Paul
Head of Product at Blast Off Apps & PMP, Scrum Master Certified Product Manager with 10+ years of experience
Imagine a client that didn't go well and imagine one that did. From our experience, we have found that the latter is because the client was truly a team member and the former is because of very specific challenges in the outsourcing relationship. Technical jargon can be off putting and "burn-out" clients, at the same time they need to be a team member and lead the process, and the current methods of outsourcing revolve on client-facing waterfall practices and multiple tools such as Slack, Trello, Asana, and the other myriad of tools for communication with clients. This is an inefficient process and the Mercury Platform was born along side outsourced development. The mission of Mercury is to bring outsourced development efficiency into parity with in-house development.
What holds outsourcing back
Clients are normally non-technical. The specs they give are poor and vague because they just don't have the knowledge to write a full specification in the proper irreducible form. As the process moves forward, these technical conversations can sometimes leak into their communications. We found from surveys that an average of 2.0 tools are used for client communication and 2.1 different tools used for internal communication in outsourcing firms and freelancers. This spreads out important information and causes omissions and at the very least a lot of time collecting requirements and keeping the client on the same page with you and your team.
The solution has been seen to be segmenting clients and bridging the gap in knowledge with intuitive design and strategically automated processes that can inject true agile iterative development, that makes sense to the client giving them full control.
We all know waterfall can't keep pace with Agile development, but the concept is new and hard to grasp for non-technical clients. Changing their environment and installing guardrails to keep them from harming production, but inject them with power to see directly into development without getting bombarded with technical talk between the development team and other technical experts.
Segmenting communication was successful for us and our partners when the Mercury Platform was launched a couple years ago internally. By focusing communication with the clients and technical staff alike on different levels of specificity, clients through developers were more productive and successful.
Mercury is being launched as a SaaS for you and your organization to experience the added repeatability, customer satisfaction, and added revenue our retired development firm created.
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