Ask: Outsourcing vs Local Development Panel Session

Feb 16, 2011 by kirsty-pitkin

Mahendra Mahey outlined the goals of the DevCSI project, which looks to gage the value of local developers within institutions, compared to outsourcing. He identified the bipolar views identified by his research, including how highly skilled developers are essential for innovation, whilst others felt developers were a luxury that could not be afforded. Mahey described the next stage of the research, which involves more human-level case studies examining the impact of specific developers and their work.

He identified that one of the problems is that there is no clear career development paths for developers, which may explain why many leave higher and further education institutions.

Peter Barnes described the career path available within his institution, Reading University, and identified that pay scales may also be a problem, which adds hidden costs when institutions have to recruit more frequently when staff leave for better pay in the commercial sector.

Mark van Harmelen from Hedtel commented that one of the DevCSI survey responses, “developers are lazy and don’t bother with documentation”, probably results more from a failure in the developer culture and in management at an institution.

Members of the audiences then shared their experiences, which included managers who are scared to let developers do things and don’t know how to manage them effectively. One of the suggestions to solve this issue recommended that DevCSI run workshops for the managers as well as workshops for developers. Mahey identified that developers who have progressed to managerial level would be the best people to run such workshops, as they have experience of developer culture.

The group agreed that there is a real problem with managers understanding the developers’ work. However, managers who have previously been developers may not necessarily have contemporaneous experience, so all managers still need to take responsibility for keeping up to date on current methods, such as Agile development.

The audience then shared their experiences with communications issues between managers and developers, including a lack of clear direction for a project, which can often put managers off when considering innovative internal development. There was a question as to whether part of a developer’s job should be educating their managers to a certain extent, which would imply that communications skills may be a vital part of training for developers.

The session then focused on outsourcing, with observations from industry, which tends to mix and match local, in-house development, with outsourcing. This is about balancing the abilities of the company to innovate with the costs involved. For the manager, the requirements for a project are much the same whether the project is undertaken in-house or outsourced. What changes the contractual situation, including ownership of developments.

One of the audience suggestions for the DevCSI project involved looking at the cost of outsourcing to provide a comparison to the local developer. Participants also discussed collaboration between institutions and the need for a UK educational developers database. However, there was some debate as to whether this would be sustainable in the current competitive environment. There were often perspectives shared from FE, where competition is less, but there are different challenges.

Participants also identified some of the misunderstandings that institutions have when considering to outsource. These included a failure to budget for ongoing consultancy and assistance following an outsourced project, or employing staff to look after what was considered an outsourced project. This may make it difficult to get definitive figures about the costs of outsourcing for UK institutions.

Mahey concluded by appealing for developers to share case studies and experiences with him to contribute to the DevCSI project.