Before embarking on a consultant’s evaluation journey an organization should first evaluate its needs and business priorities. Basing on these a successful evaluation metrics can be formed that can help track the implementation phases and make better decisions.
Depending upon whether an organization prefers to offshore or design a SharePoint site in-house, an organisation must exercise proper due diligence before selecting a suitable consultant for designing a SharePoint site. For small businesses it would be prudent to hire a local SharePoint consultant for obvious reasons but a global company will need extended assistance from a full fledged SharePoint consulting company. Here are some of the factors that medium size enterprises or big enterprises can weigh in to evaluate the most suitable offshore consultant for designing a SharePoint site.
1. SharePoint Consulting Company’s Experience
This will help organizations leverage the economics of learning curve of its offshore consulting firm by bringing in expertise, best practices drawn from years of experience in implementing SharePoint across various industries.
2. Types of Clients Catered
An offshore SharePoint consulting firm’s website can give you a peek into their domain experiences and if they have worked for a similar client based out of the same geography it would work in favor of the outsourcing organization.
3. Case Studies by visiting their websites
Case studies or project profiles are a great way to assess an offshore service providers capabilities and types of projects they have handled.
4. Quality Processes/Compliance norms
Quality assurance is an absolute must in ensuring that a SharePoint implementation facilitates organizations to collaborate effectively. Hence, it is important to check the offshore SharePoint consultant’s credentials, quality norms and other IT policies.
5. Delivery Model
If an offshore SharePoint consultant has a regional office at your location it would be easy to communicate and acquire trust factor. Hence, offshore SharePoint Consulting companies’ delivery model also counts.
6. Are they Microsoft Technology Partners
Microsoft competency partnership demonstrates and differentiates offshore SharePoint consultants’ expertise and competencies in developing SharePoint applications. If an offshore consultant is a Microsoft SharePoint partner then the consultant definitely has proven expertise and skill levels to develop robust SharePoint solutions. Microsoft also offers SharePoint development certification courses. Making sure that the consulting companies hire only Microsoft certified .Net experts will go a along way in ensuring a successful SharePoint development.
7. IT Policies of the Country
A favorable IT policy of a country facilitates ease of doing business and has stringent laws on IPR security. Hence companies evaluating their offshore service providers should take into consideration IT policies of a country.
8. Ease of Communication
Language friendliness is one of the vital criteria to select an offshore partner as a successful project deployment requires a lot of project meetings.
9. Ratings and Reviews of the offshore company (if you are based out of USA)
Companies like bestwebdesignagencies.com provides ratings on top SharePoint Companies across the US. This may help organizations select best SharePoint company for designing a SharePoint site.
10. Pilot Phase Project Evaluation
Pilot projects are a great way of assessing offshore companies’ ability to provide superior services and support. Basing on the evaluation of pilot project, organizations can go forward replicate the same practice across the organization.
Several other factors like technical detailing of a project, project schedule, pilot phase information architecture and company’s resource strengths also play crucial roles in evaluating an offshore SharePoint company.