Client’s Readiness Assessment Success Factors for Outsourcing Software Projects

IT services such as software development, application maintenance, disaster recovery, help desk, network and operations are critical and highly demanded to better support the operations and management of organizations, especially in the government sector. The government sector faces various problems in providing IT services due to constraints or lack of knowledge, skills and expertise, human resource and technology. Thus, IT services need to be outsourced to overcome these problems. While the need for outsourcing has increased, reported weaknesses of the outsourcing activities are attributed to issues such as project rationale and the unclear role of the project team, lack of involvement of subject matter experts and users in the early stages, lack of control and lack of emphasis on quality. These issues indicate the low readiness level of the client’s organization to take up outsourcing activities. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the contributing readiness factors that clients should comply with in order to ensure the success of outsourcing software projects. Systematic reviews and content analysis were employed in order to propose a conceptual model. There are 27 factors identified and classified into 9 dimensions.  There are six internal dimensions were identified as contributing to the client’s readiness such as strategy, people, organization culture, process, technology and management whilst three other external dimensions include the government, market and people. The outcome of this study is a software outsourcing readiness model that will assist software practitioners in designing effective outsourcing software project strategies. The model is important since the agencies have difficulty in addressing their readiness level as part of the implementation plan and to avoid project failure.