软件测试 -- 管理系列 -- (1) 准备工作 <1.1 理解软件外包>

软件测试 -- 管理系列 -- (1) 准备工作 <1.1 理解软件外包>

做软件外包这一行业，首先应该对外包有详细的了解。本文就收集了不少软件外包的资料，整理之后，给大家分享。

What is Outsourcing?

Definition of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is commonly defined as the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of a business process to an external service provider. In any outsourcing agreement, there are at least two parties involved:

• Client
  The company that decides to have an external party perform. one or more of its business processes.

• Provider
  The company that manages and/or executes the business process on behalf of the client.

This is the simplest and most direct outsourcing agreement. In larger, more complex outsourcing constructions, there may be one or more brokers in between the client and the provider. There may also be multiple providers taking on different parts of the project. Brokers generally act as middlemen whose services commonly specialize in finding the right providers on behalf of the client and taking over some of the operational management. MicroSourcing is an outsourcing solutions provider, not a broker.

Outsourcing based on Business Process

Looking at the different business processes being outsourced, we can identify three main categories:

• Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO)
  Outsourcing the design, development, implementation, and management of IT products and processes to a third party provider.
• Voice Outsourcing
  Outsourcing call center functions such as customer support and telemarketing to a third party provider.

• Non-voice Outsourcing
  Business processes that do not fall under ITO or Voice Outsourcing. Examples are accounting, marketing, sales, research and development, and administrative tasks.

MicroSourcing specializes in a number of fields that mostly fall in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Non-voice Outsourcing categories. For more information on these specializations, visit ourdisciplinessection.

Outsourcing based on Geographical Distance

Besides the type of business processes involved, we can also look at the geographical distance between the client and the provider:

• Inshoring/Onshoring
  Client and provider are in the same country. An example would be a company based in New York outsourcing to a company based in Boston.

• Nearshoring
  Client and provider are in different countries but at a relatively short distance from each other. For instance, a US-based company outsourcing to a Mexico-based provider.

• Offshoring
  Client and provider are in different countries and at a considerable distance from each other. An example would be a US-based company outsourcing to an India-based provider.

Benefits of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a powerful business tool used by millions of companies all over the world. Here's a closer look at the advantages of outsourcing:

• Cost Savings
  Lower costs have always been the primary outsourcing advantage. Direct savings are made by the cost difference in salaries, benefits, and operational expenses between most Western countries and offshore destinations like India, China, and the Philippines. Indirect cost savings are often derived from the client's ability to refocus on its core business and outsource secondary processes to a specialized external provider.

• Expertise
  Outsourcing gives you access to knowledge pools that you might not have inside your own company. Instead of trying to build your own creative design department, you could, for instance, outsource your web design and marketing materials development to specialized agencies. In the old economy, big companies had their own departments for every business requirement. In the network economy, companies go back to their core business and use a network of external partners to take care of the rest.

• Availability
  In certain sectors, it can be very hard to find highly skilled people who are willing to join your company. A good example is the ICT sector. Not a lot of small businesses will be able to find and afford seasoned .NET developers. Outsourcing provides a channel through which business can find readily available high-level expertise at affordable rates.

• Flexible Capacity Management
  Outsourcing enables your company to manage its capacity and staff. The task of hiring personnel is passed on to an external provider with whom you can work out a deal based on a certain output quantity/quality, a certain number of hours, or any other type of commitment.
• Time Zone Coverage
  By using external providers, you can cover time zones that are not covered by your domestic operation. Offshoring destinations like the Philippines have a workforce that is willing to work during non-regular office hours. Setting up a 24/7/365 operation is generally easier offshore.

Drawbacks of Outsourcing

Outsourcing can provide considerablebenefitsto your company. However, there are definitely a number of drawbacks that you need to be aware of in order to make a good assessment:

• Management & Control Problems
  Effectively managing the operation of a department within your own company is challenging enough. Effectively controlling an offshore operation is difficult due to the geographical distance, time-zone difference, and lack of face-to-face communication.
• Failure to Deliver
  With external sources, you are trusting a third party to deliver a certain quantity/quality of deliverables. Should your provider fail to deliver, you are likely to suffer the consequences despite the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) you had in place.
• Exposure
  Outsourcing exposes a certain part of your business to a third party. Unless you completely shield your offshore operation, you might expose your company to a breach of confidentiality, malicious use of system access, and other vulnerabilities in your organization.

• Negative Reputation
  Outsourcing has gained a negative reputation and even though studies have proven otherwise, the general public opinion remains that offshoring eliminates domestic jobs. Your employees, clients, and partners might not appreciate the fact that you are offshoring certain business processes especially if that means that you are terminating a part of your domestic operation.

• Company Value
  The major risk of outsourcing is that you may not be building the value of your company in terms of personnel, in-house knowledge, and infrastructure. In this case, the value of an outsourcing agreement with a provider will be less effective than an internal department.

Overcoming these drawbacks will rely on identifying the right business processes for outsourcing, finding the best outsourcing provider, and setting up a good structure for your offshore operation. At MicroSourcing, we understand the level of trust it takes to outsource a process to a third party. This is why our first step in setting up an outsourcing solution is properly analyzing your requirements to see how the benefits of outsourcing can be maximized and the drawbacks minimized.

Outsourcing Models

Besides the differentclassificationsof outsourcing, there are also a lot of different ways that an outsourcing solution can be structured. In this section, we'll look at some of the project variables and each outsourcing model that clients and providers can agree upon:

• Project Duration
  Are you outsourcing a project with a fixed time table and duration or are you planning to outsource a certain business process for an indefinite period of time?

• Manpower Requirements
  How many people do you need? Will these employees have full-time, part-time or freelance contracts? What skills and experience do you need them to have?

• Infrastructure & Tools
  What infrastructure will your project require? What will your people need in terms of hardware, software, and connectivity?

• Management
  How will the various management tasks be divided between you and your outsourcing provider? Who will handle HR, technical support, operational management, quality assurance, production planning, etc?

• Compensation Scheme
  How will your outsourcing provider be compensated? Will it be based on head count, man-hours or deliverables? Will there be any performance incentive schemes?

These project variables and the details involved will form. the building blocks of the final outsourcing model applied between you and your provider. We at MicroSourcing are very flexible and will work with any outsourcing model that makes sense for both the client and ourselves. Ourservicessection provides information on some of our standard solutions.

Outsourcing Pricing

Offshore outsourcing can be especially non-transparent. As an outsourcing client, you may often wonder about the margins your provider earns. Is the outsourcing cost reasonable or overpriced? In this section, we will have a look at some outsourcing pricing principles. For information about MicroSourcing's pricing structures, visit ourpricingsection. The information we provide is very general as the actual mechanisms of outsourcing pricing are a lot more complicated. It helps to understand that an outsourcing provider is just like any other company and deals with the same costs:

• Office space- rental, building dues, utilities

• Infrastructure- workstations, office equipment

• Manpower- salaries, benefits, recruitment costs
• Telecommunication- telephone, fax, internet connectivity

• Third party services- accountants, lawyers, headhunters

Unit of Cost

Like any other company, providers need to cover these costs and make a profit. A big problem is that the outsourcing cost is hard to quantify in a unit of measurement. In most cases, the computation is based on manpower:

Total Costs of Operation / Billable Full-time Employees (FTEs) = Costs per FTE

Billable FTEs refer to the people inside the provider's company that can work on client projects. This leaves out management, HR, tech support, marketing, sales, and other overhead and support functions. This pricing per FTE can then be used to decide on a cost per month, per day or even per hour. Even if the outsourcing model requires pricing per deliverable, your outsourcing provider will likely use the cost per FTE and the time required to produce a deliverable in order to get the final cost.

Provider Risk & Determining the Markup

Once your provider has decided on a unit of cost, which is usually cost per FTE, your provider will have to decide on the markup to be added. This markup will not only be determined by the profit they want to make, but the risks they will have to cover:

• Staffing / Non-billable hours
  Our founders are from a consulting background and fully understand the troubles that consultancies go through to make sure their people are staffed on projects. After all, there is nothing more costly than paying salaries to employees who are not working on any client project. These are so-called non-billable hours. If your outsourcing provider is looking to charge you by the hour, it is almost certain that a large part of their markup will cover the costs of non-billable hours.
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
  SLAs are a great way for a client to impose a certain quantity/quality level of deliverables. Although this might move responsibility from the client to the provider, this type of guarantee comes at higher costs. The provider will need to make an assessment of the resources required to meet the SLA and factor in a risk margin. After all, the costs of not meeting the SLA may be very large. For example: a provider guarantees his client at least 100 units of X each month. The provider will likely make the following equation:
  Manpower for Client = Manpower to create 100 units of X + 25% Extra Manpower for Risk Coverage
  This risk margin will cover events such as delays in production, equipment problems, resignation of employee/s, etc. In the end, this 25% extra manpower might never be used. However, for the pricing of the project, the provider is likely to include it anyway.

At MicroSourcing, we try to keep our pricing as transparent as possible and give our clients full insight into all the factors described above. We can work with any type of pricing model and we have a standard solution that minimizes risk markups. For more details, visit ourservicessection

Should you be Outsourcing?

Should you be outsourcing? As we are an outsourcing solutions provider, you would expect our answer to be a wholehearted "yes". However, we fully understand that this is a question you will have to analyze and answer yourself. You could start by looking at the list ofbenefitsanddrawbacksof outsourcing and decide how they apply to your business. In the end, you'll have to look at your business and determine why outsourcing is the best solution for certain processes. Typically, these are processes that:

• can be performed and managed from a remote location.
• are costly to perform. inside your own company.
• are difficult to build the necessary capacity for.

• are distracting you from your core business.

• require a certain level of flexibility in terms of staffing and/or capacity.

If you have such processes within your company, outsourcing them is definitely an option worth exploring. Our team at MicroSourcing is more than willing to analyze your business with you to see why outsourcing can be used as an effective business tool. Simplycontactusto get things started.

Glossary

It pays to know the different terms commonly used by outsourcing players.

Back-office– collective term for tasks performed in running a company; this includes technical support, customer service, human resources, etc.

Build Operate Transfer (BOT)– a type of outsourcing solution or service delivery model wherein a service provider takes on the initial work (recruitment, workstation setup, operations management, etc.), then the client gradually takes over the offshore operation

Business ProcessOutsourcing (BPO)– the process of transferring the management and/or execution of a specific business process to a service provider

Captivecenter– refers to the extension of business operations; the parent company has full control over the business processes

Client- refers to the company that transfers business processes to a service provider; also called service buyer or simply buyer

Corecompetencies– collective term for the internal skills, knowledge sets, and/or capabilities that give companies a competitive edge

Dataprocessing– an outsourcing discipline that involves entry, manipulation or encoding of data into the system or database of the client

Fixed project pricing– a pricing model in which the cost is agreed upon by the client and service provider before working on a project

Gamemoderation- an outsourcing discipline that involves screening content/messages from players in role-playing games (rpg) or massive multi-player online (mmo) games, approving those that are within set guidelines, and removing offensive, malicious, and/or pornographic content

Human Resource Outsourcing(HRO)– refers to the transfer of human resource-related tasks to a service provider

InformationTechnology Outsourcing (ITO)– refers to the transfer of the management, implementation, and/or execution of IT products and/or processes to a service provider

Key PerformanceIndicator (KPI)– refers to the quantitative and/or qualitative measure of performance; used to determine if the goals are met and address problems that cause poor performance

Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO)- the process of transferring the management and/or execution of knowledge-related and information-related business process to a service provider

Non-voiceoutsourcing– transfer of non-voice BPO work (administrative tasks, creative writing, etc.) to a service provider

Offshore staffleasing– a type of outsourcing solution or service delivery model that enables you to handpick employees who will work for you from an offshore location; gives you full and direct control over the employees, tools, and resources needed in the operation

Offshore team– a team of full-time employees working for you exclusively from an offshore location; size can range from 1 to 25 employees

Offshoring– the process of moving the management and/or execution of a business process to a service provider located in a country that is geographically distant from the client

Outsourcing– the general term that refers to the transfer of management and/or execution of a business process to a service provider

Projectbrief– refers to a short outline or introduction about a project; this includes some basic information such as project duration, manpower and tools needed, type of management, etc.

Service provider– refers to the company that manages and/or executes the business processes transferred by the client; also called service vendor, supplier or simply provider

Short-termstaff leasing– an outsourcing agreement designed for clients who only need at least one full-time employee to take on a small project for a short period of time

Transcription– process of converting audio and/or scanned image files into written form; files can be from business meetings, seminars, conferences, and focus group discussions

User-generated content(UGC) moderation– an outsourcing discipline that involves screening content (messages, images, videos, etc.) from users, approving those that are within set guidelines, and removing offensive, malicious, and/or pornographic material

Virtualcaptive– also known as synthetic or hybrid captive; a type of outsourcing solution or service delivery model wherein the service provider handles the recruitment process and operational management while enabling you to maintain full control over your large-scale offshore operation

Voiceoutsourcing- transfer of voice-based work or call center functions (customer support, telemarketing, etc.) to a service provider

欧美软件外包的主要模式浅析

软件外包的模式主要包括现地开发模式、近岸开发模式、离岸开发模式、离岸开发中心ODC模式、现地离岸相结合模式。

(一)现地开发模式:软件开发人员外派到客户场地工作,一般项目管理有客户方来管理。优点是IP方面的保护更安全,缺点是客户方面场地和管理成本相对其他外包模式要大。

(二)近岸开发模式:邻国而不是本国或者遥远国家的技术人员来完成工作和服务的模式。比如,美国公司把工作外包给加拿大和墨西哥。近岸开发模式的优点在于地理位置近,旅行和通讯更方便和便宜,文化差异小,同样的语言,沟通方面。缺点在于一般成本较离岸外包高。

(三)离岸开发模式:客户将一些离散项目或功能进行离岸发包,这种模式的优点在于客户方面在管理和场地等方面的成本大为减少,风险在于数据安全性或数据保护问题、业务知识的流失、文化差异、关键人员的跳槽、知识转移问题等。

(四)离岸开发中心ODC模式:在服务供应商的场地上按照客户的安全和基础设施标准为客户建立一支特定的技术开发团队,最高目标是成为客户自身IT部门的一个无缝链接和扩展。优点是交付灵活,省却了专门IT部门建立的场地和管理费用,并且有效利用服务供应商所在地区的人才资源.挑战在于在供应商选择,知识产权管理,以及沟通方面的难度。

(五)在岸、离岸相结合模式:中国软件外包商向欧美客户所在地派驻现场(Onsite)服务人员,向客户提供直接的面对面服务。

信息服务外包中几个基本名词，解释一下

ITO (Information Technology Outsourcing) 信息技术外包

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) 业务流程外包

KPO (KnowledgeProcess Outsourcing) 知识管理外包

1)ITO是指服务外包发包商以合同的方式委托信息技术服务外包提供商向企业提供部分或全部

信息技术服务功能，主要包括信息技术的系统、应用管理及技术支持的服务

2)BPO是指服务外包发包商将一个或多个原本企业内部的职能外包给外部服务提供商，由后者

来拥有、运作、管理这些指定的职能，涉及的领域非常广泛，主要包括企业的需求管理、内部

管理及业务运作服务、供应链管理等

3)KPO是一个帮助客户研究解决方案的方式，主要是通过多种途径来获取信息，经过即时、综合

的分析、判断和研究解释，并提出建议，将报告呈现给客户，作为决策的依据。它包括评估研究

、投资研究和技术研究、专利申请、网上教育等。也可以说KPO是BPO中一种更为高端的服务模

式。目前,许多大型企业开展的研发(R&D)可以看作是KPO中的重要内容之一

美国、日本、欧盟三种离岸服务外包模式比较分析

形成基础不同。美国奉行自由竞争的市场规则，坚决制裁各种形式的垄断，美国联邦法院在本世纪初对微软的反垄断诉讼就是其中一例。美国跨国公司实行两级中心管理模式，将业务活动划分为国内部门和国际部门两大板块，其中国内部门行使国内各机构总部的职能，对本土市场的经营活动负有协调与控制的职责。这使得跨国公司的各事业部拥有较大的权限，并且互相之间在一定范围内展开竞争。各事业部作为独立的利润中心，各自从自身利益出发直接进行业务外包活动，在国内总部不干预的情况下，不会过多考虑其它事业部的外包情况。这种由各事业部直接管理外包活动的方式催生了美国跨国公司的“倒T型”离岸服务外包模式。

日本企业的跨国经营是在政府支持下由综合商社主导完成的，这些综合商社拥有垄断竞争优势，并在多个行业逐步形成寡头垄断的局面，这使得日本跨国公司大多实行“金字塔型”的总部集权组织结构，在服务行业也不例外。在日本企业中，公司文化一直扮演着重要角色，无论是年功序列制还是终身雇佣制，都曾对日本跨国公司在上个世纪70—80年代所向披靡的超强竞争力做出了重要贡献。虽然在长时间的经济停滞局面下，终身雇佣制难以维系，但仍深刻影响着所有日本企业。为了缓解就业压力，在政府的号召下，日本跨国公司将其绝大多数工作岗位留在了国内。由于日本最终用户对接包方的要求极其苛刻，且其具体需求常常需要接包方通过多次的沟通与反馈才能明晰，因此，只有日本本地的规模较大的接包商能够胜任。另一方面，日本的分级开发体系要求上游接包企业向下游接包企业提供详细的作业指示文件，这使得代码转换和软件测试等的离岸外包成为可能。这些共同造就了日本跨国公司的“金字塔型”离岸服务外包模式。

欧盟跨国公司也普遍采用类似美国企业的事业部的组织结构，但其在管理上采用的是分权模式，本土各部门的经营活动与国外子公司一样很少受到公司总部的控制。但由于欧盟市场相对狭小，本土各事业部为了共同开发市场，提高整个公司的利润率，常常并肩作战，将某些功能相似的价值链环节重组为新的业务部门。为应对严格限制离岸外包的国内法规，新组建的事业部中只有部分低端服务才能外包给国外企业去做，从而形成了欧盟跨国公司的“橄榄型”离岸服务外包模式。