How to choose the best nearshoring service provider in IT?

Outsourcing services in the IT industry are gaining popularity. The solution has many advantages and is, above all, economical. It reduces time and costs related to the recruitment and creation of a dedicated department. However, the selection process itself can be time-consuming, but we can help you save time. 

In this article, we explain:

🚀 how important it is to set priorities in the entire process,
🚀 why communication with nearshoring partners is important,
🚀 what tools help automate the selection process.

Let’s start from scratch – defining needs and expectations

Before you start looking for an IT service provider, it is worth asking yourself a few questions to identify the needs and expectations of a potential IT subcontractor. Let’s establish the criteria for selecting a potential nearshoring partner.
Let’s get started!

When should you decide on nearshoring?

You have landed a massive, advanced project that requires an experienced IT team. You have six months for execution. Your specialists have their hands full. What you need is a nearshoring partner. You want the work culture, the language of communication, and the time zone of the service provider to be compatible with yours. 

Criteria for choosing the best IT partner

Company size

The first important selection criterion is the verification of a potential IT subcontractor based on the size of a company and years in business. It will give you insight into the company’s stability as well as its solvency.

j-labs ground is very stable – we have been operating in the field of body leasing for over 13 years! Currently, j-labs has two offices in Poland (Kraków and Warsaw)
and a rapidly developing branch in Munich. We already have 400+ qualified employees on board. Our ambitions are growing year by year. We are saying it not to boast but to raise awareness. It is important to know about the financial situation of your outsourcing partner, especially in a pandemic. 

Experience of a nearshoring team in the IT industry

A crucial factor you want to check is the company’s experience in outsourcing and its project portfolio.  

We develop case studies for most completed projects, for example:

🚀 Cert4Trust – enabling validation of a digital document in terms of issuer, content, and validity in an easy, fast and unambiguous way

🚀 B2C Ordering Platform – development of a comprehensive e-commerce platform enabling a customer to buy and receive an order on the same day

j-labs hires highly skilled developers with an average experience of 8 years. We are ambitious, and we bet on real experts. We support renowned corporations from all over the world – Samsung, PWC, Comarch, to name just a few. Our Delivery Manager analyses the needs and assembles a dedicated development team or selects engineers to support a client’s team. 

We provide world-class outsourcing services. j-labs is recommended as an excellent IT partner on the Clutch website: https://clutch.co/profile/j-labs-software-specialists

Experience and commitment are most important to us and we want to work with like-minded professionals. You probably do too. 

Talent pool – what matters to us is the passion for acquiring knowledge

If you were to choose between IT experts who continuously extend knowledge and IT employees who have simply worked for years and never evolved, who would you choose? The answer is simple. When looking for the right nearshoring partner, you should definitely determine whether the team presents the highest level of skills or the so-called “book knowledge”. 

How to check if a company actually keeps its knowledge up-to-date? Just look at the company’s social media or website. Do they share information about educational initiatives? As j-labs, we are happy to write about our talent pool.

We believe in continuous knowledge development. We have created an internal knowledge transfer initiative, TALK4DEVS, to share interesting examples of case studies. However, we quickly went beyond the company framework with TALK4DEVS – it turned into a cyclical industry event attended by 1000 people each year. We host internationally recognized speakers.  You can find the recording of an exemplary case study presentation here.

Verify your subcontractors to see if they are up to date with knowledge and skills. It is better to spend more time on this in the process of searching for a nearshoring company than to repent later for hiring a team with poor knowledge and no passion.

Work culture – openness matters

When looking for an ideal IT subcontractor, apart from experience, issues such as openness to people and similar work culture are of great importance. You need to like each other. 

Companies choose nearshoring teams based on cultural proximity and time zone to avoid language barriers and differences in working hours.

At j-labs, we hire people with different characters, but what distinguishes us is high interpersonal skills. We are assertive and care about internal relations. 

When working on an important project, you do not want to waste time on communication problems, so pay attention to this aspect when selecting a partner.

Outsourcing – tools that help automate the selection of the best nearshoring partner

Having conducted an internal analysis of resources, needs, and expectations, you can move on to choosing the best IT service provider.

In this case, we encourage you to use tools for assessing the security of provided services based on:

🚀 Accreditation

🚀 GDPR

🚀 Information Security

🚀 Security controls

🚀 Data Governance

🚀 Security Audits

Using the JUSTROCKET tools, you can set criteria such as experience, specialization, and project duration to create a cost estimate for the outsourcing service.

With all this information, you will establish cooperation with the best nearshoring partner.  Good luck!