Cloud-Based Outsourcing Framework for Efficient IT Project Management Practices

The optimum utilization of human resources is one of the crucial exercises in IT organizations. To provide a well-organized and cohesive working environment, organizations need to review their work culture in reference to newly evolved tools and techniques. To reduce the development cost of the IT projects and the optimum utilization of human resources, organizations need to review and redesign the project development processes. The significant challenges faced by IT organizations are the rapid switch-over (attrition) of IT professionals, physical migration or deployment, and redeployment of the human resources. This research paper is an effort towards the multilateral exploration of the techniques to adapt and improve the ICT enabled project management practices in an outsourced environment. This research is an effort with special reference to developing countries such as Ethiopia, where an acute shortage of high skilled IT human resources and their physical migration from one project location to another project location is a costly and challenging task. Ethiopia as a developing country and its IT industry is challenged by several issues like the capacity of ICT infrastructure and the skilled human resources. In such situations, IT projects are either challenged, impaired, or completed failed due to lack of IT human resources with desired skills and ultramodern up to date IT infrastructure. In this research paper, cloud computing technology is assumed as a key to the solution. For this, a systematic and careful investigation using mixed data analysis approach was used to adopt cloud-based outsourcing in IT project management practices i.e. design, development, and testing over outsourced systems by outsourced IT human resources. The major findings of this paper are to investigate and analyze how these cloud-based resources can be explored without physical movement or migration. For the novel improvement in the existing IT project management practices, the salient stakeholders' views were collected and analyzed for designing cloud-based outsourcing IT project management framework for the Ethiopian IT industry. The framework was functionally tested over the cloud-based Bitrix24 platform.