Practice what you preach: Agile Outsourcing

While we develop our project management solution, we always use the working code from the last iteration to manage the project through the next iteration. So we can make sure that the current project management solution is as good and simple as it gets to manage an agile outsourced project. Outfarm’s solution is unique because it supports the whole life cycle of such a project.

Let others do the work

There are only two things that need to be done: gather the project requirements and create a request for proposal. These steps are necessary and there are tools that assist you with both. The agile supplier will then break down your requirements into smaller tasks and estimate the duration of these tasks. Upon acceptance of a proposal, all this information can be imported into the project plan. You can even let the supplier assign all the requirements to the team members and plan the releases/iterations or sprints.

Wash, rinse, repeat: Incremental does it.

We advocate that you approach the whole business of outsourcing as an iterative process. Let your suppliers price a small piece of work first and then go forward with the preferred supplier. While they are working at this part of the project, prepare the next couple of development iterations and let them fill out another proposal. This puts you in the unique position to adjust the project to at every step. It also enables you to work with more than one company on the same project. Oufarm’s solution is specifically built to support this type of iterative outsourcing.