IT Outsourcing to India - Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M? Scrum or Waterfall

Planning to outsource IT project to India? - The series of blogs will help you to get some honest tips and tricks that will help you achieve success while working with IT firms in India.

Some queries you as the prospective Client may be going through, would be "Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M contract or Hybrid or other? Scrum or Waterfall "

Most IT developers in India, if given a chance, prefer building things with quality in mind, sort of “craftsman ethos”. Any other mode of work, gets blamed to time-pressure, so self-estimation tends to be more effective. FixedBid projects doesn't allow the room for self estimation, as the project is, already signed for a dollar amount and timeline before it reaches the team that is going to work on it. So, i would recommend "Scrum Process model in T&M" as the ideal way to outsource to India

•    Typically small to medium IT firms would like to work with you on a T&M model. The large part of risk is on client. If you are signing up for more than 8 to 10 FTEs and that too for a period of say, 1 year or more - the risk is lesser, you are likely to get a solid team of smart professionals. But, Scrum is the process model that helps you mitigate under delivery risks. The catch is to find services firms, with maturity in delivering through scrum. 

       Scrum means, you would need a smart product owner at your end, who can drive the project in an Agile model, with weekly scrutiny of time-sheets and work products, it does work, but it takes a lot of hard-work on client's part.

Remember that, in India you will find highly dedicated resources who works in a firm, just because he/she "likes" the project and the reporting head at client end. It is important you play a hard cop - soft cop role carefully. Remember that, if you go too hard with Account management team and too nice with delivery team, it will eventually spoil the relation.