This invention relates to a method for arriving at an optimal decision to migrate the development, conversion, support and maintenance of software applications to off shore/off site locations to gain advantages of lower costs and significantly larger skill pools with equivalent or higher quality of service.
Off shore normally refers to a remote location in another country other than the country where the software application currently resides.
Off site normally refers to another location in the same country (other than the site where the software application currently resides, which is also referred to as on site).
With a constant focus on the desire to decrease operating costs fueled in part by an increasing demand for qualified IT skills, there is pressure within today's corporate world to move the development, support and maintenance of software (Applications Development and Maintenance—also referred to as AD/M) to alternate locations, where the advantages of lower costs and significantly larger skills pools can be leveraged without sacrificing the quality of service provided.
The main catalysts that promote this kind of thinking are
As of now there is no single comprehensive method or process available that allows for a foolproof decision making system that identifies the problem areas to achieve maximum success rate. It is more of a ‘hit-or-miss’ situation.
The object of this invention is therefore to provide a framework:
A finely tuned process incorporating checks and balances at key points needs to be followed to ensure that:
To achieve said objectives, this invention provides a method for implementing an off shore/off site activity in an organization, with most optimal skills transfer process comprising the steps of:
The off shore/off site activity can relate to
The phases for the development of a new project system comprise of:
The evaluation requirement is carried out 90-100% on site, 70-90% of which is in-house and 30-10% is outsourced.
The evaluation requirement is optimally carried out 100% on site, 80% of which is in-house and 20% is outsourced.
Analysis of the requirements is 90-100% on site and the experts conducting the analysis are 40-60% from in-house and 60-40% are outsourced.
Analysis of the requirements is 100% on site and the experts conducting the analysis optimally are 50% from in-house and 50% are outsourced.
The high level system design development is carried out by 40-60% on site and 60-40% at remote location.
The high level system design development is optimally carried out by 50% on site and 50% at remote location.
The high level system design development is carried out 40-60% in-house and 60-40% is outsourced.
The high level system design development is optimally carried out 50% in-house and 50% is outsourced.
The low level system design development is carried out 40-60% on site and 60-40% remote.
The low level system design development is optimally carried out 50% on site and 50% remote.
The low level system design development is carried out 15-35% in house and 85-65% is outsourced.
The low level system design development is optimally carried out 25% in house and 75% is outsourced.
The development of program specification, program code, verification and validation (V&V) test and link and system test are carried out 10-30% on site and 90-70% at remote location.
The development of program specification, program code, verification and validation (V&V) test and link and system test are optimally carried out 20% on site and 80% at remote location.
The said development is carried out 0-20% in-house and 100-80% is outsourced.
The said development is optimally carried out 10% in-house and 90% is outsourced.
Acceptance of the project is carried out 20-40% on site and 80-60% at remote location.
Acceptance of the project is optimally carried out 30% on site and 70% at remote location.
The said acceptance of the project is carried out 10-30% in-house and 90-70% is outsourced.
The said acceptance of the project is optimally carried out 20% in-house and 80% is outsourced.
The documentation and training is carried out 70-90% on site and 30-10% on remote location.
The documentation and training is optimally carried out 80% on site and 20% on remote location.
The documentation and training is carried out 20-40% in-house and 80-60% is outsourced.
The documentation and training is optimally carried out 30% in-house and 70% is outsourced.
The conversion from existing project system to a new project system comprising:
The analysis is carried out on site, 90-100%, with of the said analysis is 70-90% in-house and 30-10% is outsourced.
The analysis is optimally 100% on site with 80% of the said analysis is in-house and 20% is outsourced.
The development of the pilot program is 40-60% on site and 60-40% at remote location while the experts are 40-60% from in-house and 60-40% are outsourced.
The development of the pilot program is optimally 50% on site and 50% at remote location while the experts are 50% from in-house and 50% are outsourced.
The said test data development is carried out 80-100% on-site and 20-0% at remote location.
The said test data development is optimally carried out 90% on-site and 10% at remote location.
The said test data development is carried out 40-60% in-house and 60-40% is outsourced
The said test data development is optimally carried out 50% in-house and 50% is outsourced.
The said conversion from the existing system to new system is carried out 0-20% on-site and 100-80% at remote location.
The said conversion from the existing system to new system is optimally carried out 10% on-site and 90% at remote location.
The said conversion from the existing system to new system is carried out 15-35% in-house and 85-65% is outsourced.
The said conversion from the existing system to new system is optimally carried out 25% in-house and 75% is outsourced.
The said acceptance of the new system is carried out 50-70% on-site and 50-30% at remote location.
The said acceptance of the new system is optimally carried out 60% on-site and 40% at remote location.
The said acceptance of the new system is carried out 15-35% in-house and 85-65% is outsourced.
The said acceptance of the new system is optimally carried out 25% in-house and 75% is outsourced.
The said post-acceptance of the new system is carried out 70-90% on-site and 30-10% at remote location
The said post-acceptance of the new system is optimally carried out 80% on-site and 20% at remote location.
The said post-acceptance of the new system is carried out 30-50% in-house and 70-50% is outsourced.
The said post-acceptance of the new system is optimally carried out 40% in-house and 60% is outsourced.
The said maintenance of the existing project system comprises:
The planning is carried out 80-100% on site and 20-0% remote.
The planning is optimally carried out 90% on site and 10% remote.
The planning is carried out 60-80% in house and 40-20% is outsourced.
The planning is optimally carried out 70% in house and 30% is outsourced.
The knowledge transfer is carried out 80-100% on site and 20-0% remote.
The knowledge transfer is optimally carried out 90% on site and 10% remote.
The knowlegde transfer is carried out 40-60% in house and 60-40% is outsourced.
The knowlegde transfer is optimally carried out 50% in house and 50% is outsourced.
The managed perform is carried out 80-100% on site and 20-0% at remote location.
The managed perform is optimally carried out 90% on site and 10% at remote location.
The managed perform is carried out 20-40% in house and 80-60% is outsourced.
The managed perform is optimally carried out 30% in house and 70% is outsourced.
The assisted perform is carried out 15-35% on-site and 85-65% at remote location.
The assisted perform is optimally carried out 25% on-site and 75% at remote location.
The assisted perform is carried out 5-25% in house and 75-95% is outsourced.
The assisted perform is optimally carried out 15% in house and 85% is outsourced.
The cutover and steady state is carried out 15-35% on-site and 65-85% remote.
The cutover and steady state is optimally carried out 25% on-site and 75% remote.
The cutover and steady state is 90-100% outsourced.
The cutover and steady state is optimally 100% outsourced.
The assessment and suitability of an application for migration off shore/off site is based on weightage given to selection parameters viz.
The said weightage is calculated by multiplying the Hari-Sriram (H-S) score for each of said selection parameters with a normalizing factor, Hari-Sriram Multilplier.
The said Hari-Sriram (H-S) score is in a range of 1 to 10.
The said normalizing factor is Hari-Sriram (H-S) Multiplier.
The said cumulative weightage for selection parameters are:
The invention will now be described in general with reference to the accompanying drawings and examples.
a & 3b show a flow chart with regard to Maintenance in a process flow and Enhancements in process flow respectively.
All activities are as explained hereinafter in detail.
a shows the workflow in a support system, from the time an error is reported to the time it is corrected, promoted to the production system and the error report is closed.
b shows similar requirements while effecting enhancements to the application, per user requests.
a illustrates the subject matter expertise available within the current team. It tracks the variation between the estimated effort and actual effort.
Project Types
For purposes of process clarity, the following project types are defined
Selection criteria: It is very important to assess a business process or application to determine whether it can be developed or supported (i.e. outsourced) from a remote location. To help in the decision making process, it is useful to start at a high level with a set of basic assumptions and then drill down; at each lower level, more specific questions can be asked to validate the original assumptions. Selection Attributes are given in Table 1 titled Selection Factors and Parameters
Interpretation
Whilst there is no fixed rule regarding their suitability for outsourcing, it is essential that an appropriate number of on-site (or in-house) personnel are retained to ensure that service SLAs, at least in respect of severity 1 errors, are met.
The above table 3C is illustrated by way of a flow diagram as shown in
Interpretation
3.1 Planning
An exhaustive analysis of the chosen system should be carried out to document
This section describes
The plan is jointly put together by the customer and vendor project managers and ensures that
To ensure that the skills transfer is on track, it is important that the management team receives timely feedback from the people conducting and undergoing the transition. The following activities enable appropriate remedial action to be taken:
As in any outsourcing initiative, it is important to monitor the progress of the transition as well as the post transition steady state period in order to
A series of graphs and charts that summarise the information that needs to be monitored and collected is provided in the Appendix ‘Monitoring Progress’ in the
Staffing Plan
Overview
The staffing plan is, perhaps, the single most important document to come out of the planning phase. Apart from providing the basis for the transition project plan, it provides a business model that demonstrates the feasibility of the outsourcing proposal itself. It contains the following important information
Note that in the following plan, ‘In-house’ refers to the existing project team, comprised of both regular employees and contractors, ‘Vendor’ refers to the supplier that the application will be outsourced to, ‘Local’ refers to the current project location, ‘Remote’ refers to the location that the vendor will support from—this could be in the same city or even in a different geography.
1.2 Skills Matrix
This section defines the hourly rates (and the organisational uplifts, adders and overheads to be factored in) to arrive at the financial feasibility of the proposed outsourcing initiatitive. It ensures that all variables are captured in one place such that any changes that might impact the financials are noted immediately. As with most maintenance projects, all finances are projected for 3 or 5 year durations.
1.3.1 Interpretation
1.4.5 Interpretation
1.7 Final Presentation (Final Week)
In order to evaluate your understanding of the system, prepare a one (1) hour presentation and be prepared to answer questions on the application, in general, how the various functions fit together, and in particular the function that you will be supporting. This will allow for any misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions to be cleared before moving back offsite.
Sample Transition Plan
1.1 Background
This document outlines the plan to transition the application skills from ABC to XYZ.
1.2 Objective
The objectives of this document are to:
The following modules have been included in the scope of transition: Accounting
It is to be noted that Operations support work is NOT included in the scope of transition.
1.4 Transition Team Organization
1.4.1 Current Team Organisation
1.4.2 Proposed Team Organistion
1.4.3 Team Contact Details
1.5 Roles and Responsibilities
Please refer to Appendix-I for definition of responsibilities for various roles mentioned in above table.
1.6 Transition Strategy
Transition of application skills will happen in three phases as described below:
Knowledge Transfer—Training
This will involve classroom sessions conducted by current managers and staff, demonstration of application modules, one on one sessions between present team and vendor staff. Each vendor staff will be assigned to one or more in-house staff for mentoring. All classroom training sessions will be run periodically to accommodate vendor staff arriving on different dates.
Please refer to the ‘Training Plan’ document (maintained by the Transition Manager) for details on the training sessions, responsibilities and schedules.
Managed Perform
vendor staff will be assigned live work. Close guidance and monitoring will be provided by the assigned the current staff.
Assisted Perform
vendor staff will be assigned live work. Assistance will be provided by the in-house staff whenever requested by the IGSI staff.
It is to be noted that the above phases indicate general progression of the skills transfer process. They may not be very distinct phases on a timeline in the sense that there may be some overlap (like vendor staff working on live problems and extending some technical assistance during the training phase).
1.7 Measurement of Success
The following criteria will be used for measuring the success of transition for each
Achievement towards these criteria will be measured and monitored through periodical reviews as explained in the section below.
1.8 Transition Schedule
The overall transition schedule is available in a separate controlled document, ‘Staff Transition Schedule’. The training schedule is available in the ‘Training Plan’.
1.9 Status Reviews and Reporting
1.10 Risk Factors and Mitigation Plans
1.11 Roles & Responsibilities
Following definitions pertain to transition phase only. Definitions of roles for the post transition phase will be included in the Support Control Plan document which will be prepared by the end of the transition phase.
a) In-House Project Executive
Sample Support Control Plan
1.1 Overview
1.1.1 Project Objectives
This document outlines the support control plan for the XYZ applications. It contains the:
A problem is a defect in the application suite, identified by the user who could be a tester, developer or an end-user of the system. Once reported, every problem has a severity level—indicative of the impact on the business—assigned to it. Severity levels can be from 1 to 4—smaller the number, greater the impact on the business process and therefore, more urgent its resolution. Additional information is provided in the section, Performance Evaluation Measures.
1.1.3 Work Environment
Applications reside on:
The roles and responsibilities of the people, from the support perspective are given below:
1.3 Problem Reporting
All problems and enhancement requests that require work to be done by the vendor/remote support will be clearly documented in the support database. Similarly the support team will update this database with the latest status of work being carried out. This database will be the primary means of communication between the end-user/customer and the support team with respect to the work being carried out. However, this does not preclude the use of other forms of communication (i.e., e-mail, phone), especially if the database is unavailable or cannot be accessed.
1.4 Support Hours
On call support is provided on all the days for severity 1 problem to ensure that the resolution is provided within the turnaround time shown in the section, Quality Objectives.
1.5 Documentation
1.5.1 Document References
1.5.2 Distribution List
1.6 Call Management
All deliverables to customer to be delivered on schedule and to meet or exceed agreed levels of service. Quality measures are:
1.7.2 Verification and Validation
The Verification and Validation (V&V) process will ensure that development standards, procedures and methods are enforced at all levels; compliance by the support team will be mandatory.
Checkpoint 1: Every code change, however trivial, will be preceded by an analysis and specification stage culminating, in the case of enhancements, in the preparation of detailed program specifications and test criteria.
Checkpoint 2: Test criteria and their results will be fully documented.
Checkpoint 3: Release of deliverables will be followed by adequate archiving of all related documentation and source/object codes to enable future audit trace ability. It should be noted that in the case of severity 1 problems, where the focus is on fixing the error in order to bring the application up, the analysis document may be bypassed until the Severity 1 is resolved.
1.8 Performance Evaluation Measures
1.8.1 Service Levels
The problem resolution time will depend on the nature of the error, its priority, the level of diagnostic evidence provided and the current workload of the support team.
The turnaround time, for each of the Severity calls are given in the section, Quality Objectives.
Unless specified otherwise, these times will be measured from the actual time of receipt of the error, by the remote support team. This is based on the assumption that there is not much of a time gap between the time the end-user logs the call and vendor acknowledging it. This will be reviewed if there is a substantial difference between the two times.
Turnaround times are very much dependent on other external factors such as complexity of the problem, impact of the solution on other application areas and prioritisation with respect to other errors/problems of similar or greater severity. In any case, the originator of the problem will be informed accordingly.
It is assumed that for severity 1 errors, the support team will have access to a single point of contact for clarifications to help them close the error as quickly as possible.
1.9 Process Flow
Maintenance: the flowchart in
1.9.3 Configuration Management
Configuration management will be handled as documented in the project control book.
1.9.4 Exception Conditions
The processes defined above should be sufficient for the normal day-to-day functioning of the support team. However, certain situations could arise which might require that certain steps or indeed the whole process needs to be bypassed to ensure early resolution of the problem in order that the impact to business is minimal. Several such cases are described below.
a) Rescheduling
Whilst the remote support team will attempt to maintain (or better) the agreed service levels, it is possible that unanticipated surges in reported problems could stretch its capacity. Under these circumstances, the customer and vendor project managers will re-prioritise the errors and reschedule target clearance dates.
b) Code Not Accessible
The remote team will contact the vendor manager who will escalate the problem with the support authority to find out the cause and resolve the issue.
c) SR Database not Accessible
If the SR database is not available to the remote team, then the vendor manager will be contacted immediately and he/she will act as the co-ordinator to ensure that the relevant details are retrieved/updated as required.
d) E-Mail not Accessible
Telephones will be used until the problem is resolved. The vendor manager will be contacted immediately to keep the customer informed of the situation and the progress.
e) Force Majeure Conditions at Remote Location
If the remote support team is not able to function because of an emergency such as the office being closed, natural calamities, civil commotion/unrest or a breakdown in communication links, where the duration of the outage is not known, the problem will be escalated immediately to the customer project managers and appropriate action taken.
f) Default Plan
Should a situation arise that is not covered by the above solutions, then the remote project will contact the vendor manager and the vendor project manager to decide an appropriate way out. The agreed solution will be documented by the vendor manager and copied to the in-house project manager, vendor management representative and the remote project manager.
Project Management
1.9.1 Timesheets & Billing
1.9.2 Project Review And Reporting: Sample graphs titled ‘Monitoring Progress’ are given in
1.10.1 Escalation Path
1.10.2 Team Contact Details
1.11 Vendor Holidays
1.12 Customer Holidays
Number | Name | Date | Kind |
---|---|---|---|
6615166 | Guheen et al. | Sep 2003 | B1 |
Number | Date | Country |
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WO 9946692 | Sep 1999 | EP |