Software development outsourcer Symphony released a well-crafted infographic that outlines the company’s high priority factors in outsourcing projects today – or as the sketch’s title puts it, “4 Ways Your Outsourcing Partner is Screwing with You.”

Bulletin number one is outcome-based contracts, which at present account for less than eight percent of all the agreements signed today.  Symphony encourages companies to adopt this new model and the cost reduction that comes with it, by hiring a second outsourcing partner.

The infographic highlights how firms are demanding more from third party R&D operations, with SLAs included in over 80 percent of all outsourcing contracts.

The second highlight is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has been proven to be very effective for smaller scale projects, and companies such as the recently funded Mavelink are doing a lot of innovating around the “human cloud.” Symphony also observed this trend, and noted how the cloud can trim overheads even more by citing some  of this area’s familiarly  impressive growth figures.

Category three outlines where outsourcing companies may not be getting their money’s worth is software. The ideal vendor is aware of the current trends influencing this industry – the cloud, SaaS and social media among other things – and is making use of these technologies to optimize R&D and the final product.

Lastly, Symphony stresses that innovating in general needs to be on the outsourcing partner’s mind.  This includes all the things mentioned above, but extends to the ability to keep up with the other trends sweeping through enterprise IT today: mobile, automation and integration. The infographic aggregated some figures that validated this claim, including an IDC prediction expecting service-enabled software to account for 28 percent of the market by 2015. Already this year 83 percent of software makers will be working on developing related products, according to the research firm.

Created by Symphony Services Outsourced Software Development