8 Steps to Successful IT Outsourcing to Ukraine

Artem Semenov, CEO of Ainstainer Group (an Ukrainian IT Outsourcing vendor), in his article in Ukraine business insights (page № 29) advises how to prevent your company from losses and minimize risks when outsourcing to Ukraine.

Ukraine is one of the most attractive destinations for outsourcing IT nowadays, as it combines such benefits as big pool of IT talents, convenient geographical location, relatively low rates and cultural proximity to European countries.

According to the “Central and Eastern Europe IT Outsourcing Review 2010”report 2010, IT outsourcing Ukrainian market value in 2010 made $697 mln, i.e. + 31,5% of growth in comparison to 2009 $530 mln.

IT Outsourcing to Ukraine

So one of the most vital questions all businessmen definitely ask themselves is how start outsourcing IT in the right way in Ukraine and what partner to choose between 940+ outsourcing companies in order to bear fruits and minimize their risks? Continue reading

What is the Best Agile Tool for Managing Distributed Teams? (The Poll’s Results)

We created a poll to find the answer to the question:

“What Agile Tool to Choose When Your Have a Remote Team?”.

To see the results, click the link below (it is a pdf-document):

What_is_the_best_Agile_tool_poll’s results (2011)

You are free to post this pdf-document whenever you want but don’t forget to add  the link to our blog.

We also added the results of the poll below for those who prefers reading without any clicks:

Terminology

(In order to be sure that we think about the same things)

Remote team vs distributed team

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POLL: the Best Agile Tool for Distributed Team

We, a team of Ainstainer Group, believe when managing distributed teams the choice of the right tool is vital.

So, we decided to create a new poll via SurveyMonkey.

We have already closed this poll. We will post the poll’s results 21.04.2011

Follow the link to see the results of this poll

To participate just click and scroll down.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

Thank you very much for your answers.

We will write an article with analysis of the results.

We will send you the results/link to our article when the results are ready.

You can also see the results of our Facebook’s poll. Once answered a question, you will see them.

Why we decided to create this poll? And what problems have occurred with Facebook?

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TargetProcess: Quick Review

The next review, we decided to do together with Agile Nearshoring, is devoted for TargetProcess.

TargetProcess logo

Pic.1 A logo of TargetProcess

The main aim of this tool is to help managing your distributed agile project teams. What is definitely a big plus, it supports Scrum, Lean (Kanban), XP and allows you to configure any convenient development process as you need.

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7 Ways How To Use Spare Time In The Sprint

“What do you do if there is some spare time left in the Sprint?” This question was asked by one of the Scrum Masters several months ago in LinkedIn Group “Scrum Practitioners”.

We have analyzed the answers of different Scrum Masters and grouped them. According to the results, the majority believes that teams should decide by themselves what to do in this situation, there are also a group of Scrum Masters that have additional list of task for this case.

Below you will find the answers that may be interesting for you.

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KanbanTool: Worth Or Not Your Attention?

Kanban is a scheduling system and thanks to it you can easily monitor your team’s workflow. It tells you what should be done, when and by whom.  In software development it is a board with a number of placeholders for work to be done. You and your team create separate tasks and place them on it. When the task is completed, you just relocate it to the “done” column.

Among the main advantages of Kanban boards are their simplicity and visualization of the working process.  You and your team always know what others team’s members do just now without asking them about it.

A lot of teams use ordinary whiteboards with stickers as Kanban boards. It really works, but not in case of distributed teams, when members are located in different offices, cities or even countries. One more point against ordinary whiteboards, is that it is not convenient to use it when your team is more than 5 members, as you should have several boards to place all the tasks. Moreover, you should take a photo of the each status’s change of the tasks to analyze the team’s workflow.

That is why the automated Kanban boards have appeared. Today there are quite a lot of such tools. All of them have their pros and cons.

We have tried the most widespread and brand new ones and in this article would like to talk about our choice for today – Kanban Tool by Shore Labs. We have successfully implemented it in our company.

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Scrum and IT Outsourcing = New Business model

If you are reading this article, probably you know what is Scrum about and for what it is used. Since it invention in 1993 many things has happened, the world has endured several crisis, we were witnesses of sound bankruptcies, merger, acquisitions etc. The 21st century world is constantly moving forward. And, in order to catch the wave and be on the spot of any industry, we should evolve constantly, especially high-intellectual businesses such as Information technologies (IT) companies.

With the help of Scrum, many businesses have already gained their competitive advantages.

Today more and more companies are using Scrum teams, i.e. teams of software engineers/developers that work within Scrum. It is really works in most of cases. And, although such teams may complete projects faster and you will have your project done in shorter periods, at that speeding up time to market, it is not enough to be ahead of competitors.

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Non-Risky Outsourcing: Truth Or Fairy Tale For Kids?

Fast changing environment, strong competition, globalization of world markets are among the main challenges for nowadays businesses. And especially they influence is evident on IT industry, where without constant innovations and new service models is practically impossible survive and be ahead of competitors. World Crisis made most of us more cost-conscious and it is ok, as the highest ROI may be reachable only using your assets cost-efficiently. We have became also more conservative and today are in search of opportunities to minimize our risks.

IT Outsourcing is far from of new trend. It is widespread worldwide and there are plenty of businesses with good or bad experience.

Why some examples of outsourcing successful while some fail? What is wrong?

The answer for today is the lack of communication, misunderstanding, non-transparent relations between IT vendors and those who outsource and distrust that are caused by classic model of dedicated development centre.

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IT Quest 11.11.11. Kharkov

Квест успешно прошел 11.11.11. Узнать детали

Приглашаем  IT-компании Харькова принять участие  в пешеходном quest’е на тему  «Матрица» 11.11.11.   

11 ноября 2011 г. компания “Ainstainer Group” проведет некоммерческое мероприятие, благодаря которому вы окунётесь в атмосферу  приключений и мир головоломок!

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5 Questions Owners Of Small Business Should Ask Themselves Before Denying Outsourcing

Do only big companies receive benefits from outsourcing?

You are wrong if your answer is “yes”.

All companies may gain similar advantages of outsourcing with no dependency on their size.

Don’t believe? You may say that:

We can successfully outsource only non-core activities (testing, QA, support, application upgrade etc). All others should be done onsite.

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