Success Factors for Software Outsourcing Partnership Management: An Exploratory Study Using Systematic Literature Review

Software outsourcing partnership (SOP) is a type of cooperative client-vendor relationship for achieving mutually beneficial goals and is totally based on mutual trust and commitment. SOP is an emerging strategy and is different to ordinary software development outsourcing (SDO). Usually, a successful and long-lasting outsourcing association between client and vendor organization might be converted to outsourcing partnership. The overarching target of this exploratory paper is to analyze a list of factors that are considered important for vendors in the renovation of their surviving contractual outsourcing relationship to a partnership. We have executed a systematic literature review (SLR) process. We have performed all the SLR phases, like protocol development, publication collection, publication quality assessment, data generalization, and reporting. We have analyzed the factors found, through SLR, based on different variables such as continents, decades, and study strategy. Some factors like “mutual trust,” “effective communication,” “organizations proximity,” “mutual inter-dependence and shared values,” “3C (coordination, cooperation, and collaboration),” and “quality production” are marked as critical, because these momentously assist vendors in renovation of the standing outsourcing relationship with client into partnership. The factors are correlated to finding any significant relationships among the factors. Vendors should address all the listed success factors, especially the critical success factors in order to attain partner position in SDO. Our outcomes will help practitioners working on outsourcing collaboration in the SDO industry. They can determine from the results of the study where to outsource and which are the emerging trends in software outsourcing.