for example, if It takes me 10 hours to complete the job, I will outsource the work to someone, who can do the same job in 2 hours. So I save time and money.

Jon
Elance

I love outsourcing. Never before were you able to tap-that resource 4000 miles away. Love it!

Sending work offshore can not be transactional. Granted, there are a bunch of mis-managed ’software sweatshops’ offshore, but some companies get burned because they don’t actually nurture a relationship with an offshore team. It’s really hard to send work abroad and expect it to come back how you see it in your minds eye. You need to develop a relationship with the offshore team so they understand what you want.

Raza Imam
http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com

 I’m usually not a big reader of TechCrunch (not because I don’t like it, but because I’m not sophisticated enough to……

1. Constant Communication. This is the most important factor to make outsourcing work. Because of culture, time and distance difference, you have to learn how to communicate with your outsourcing partners and how to train them to understand your messages. Does it really add any cost? At the beginning, yes. But after a while, when everyone is on the same page, the communication goes smoothly and you will feel benefit gained. Some of you felt pain instead of benefit because they met some liars or whatever you called. I don’t think it is fair to blame the entire industry. Is it true that liars are everywhere if you don’t know how to choose your partners?

2. Prompt status checking. You have to follow the development cycle. There is no way out no matter that you do locally, hire a near shore development team or use offshore teams on the other side of the globe. People think “ok, I pay you to do the work. I just need to sit in my resort cabinet and wait for the perfect results at the end.” No. Outsourcing leverages your cost by using cheaper labour elsewhere. It doesn’t get rid of the cost to manage them. My advice is to treat the outsourcing partnership as an extension of your current team and manage them as you do normally. If you want to outsource entire solution, you have to pay higher price in searching for a company with good reputation and paying them more to do the work. There is no such a thing that you don’t spend money or time to pre-screen the partnerships nor to manage the relationship afterwards. The project dooms to be failed if you are cheap yourself. No short-cut: everything has price.

3. Western-trained Management team on side. Trust is the key for outsourcing to succeed. You need to have faith on the management team of the outsourcing projects. If the owner of the company you outsource to is not who you know or doesn’t have a proven track record, you should hire a person who has western development experience on side. It is not difficult to find one if you are willing to pay a better price than the average developer price. This person can help you to train the team and bring the development process in line with yours. It is also your great asset to make communication (#1 issue above) succeeds.

4. Pyramid team structure. You have to ask the outsourcing team to create a structure with a few team leads and many solders under them. Team leads play crucial role in communication, status report and points of contact. They are the driving force to get your requirements or assigned tasks understood, planned, tracked and completed. On the other hand, you have to have similar structure in your local team who can constantly communicate their counterparties in the team lead level. You should absolutely avoid direct communication or giving direct commands to team member (solders). It will cause chaos.

If you do the above right, you will benefit:

a. Time difference becomes your advantage. For example, your local team finishes up development work at the west at 6PM but the eastern team starts working and continued your work if you gave some instructions. Or the QA team at east can test your work and give you quality report when you wake up next day.

b. The developers in developing countries usually feel time pressure to deliver project on time within budget. The motivation is simple: impress you and wish projects keep coming. If you have local western-trained manager on side, their 8-hour work day can be fully utilized without any break if you want. You have probably never seen such productivity. I have. (Well, there is a trade-off: quality is an issue if you do things fast. Anything else new? We have seen poor quality products all the time in US. So it is not an outsourcing issue but rather a project management issue. Agree?)

c. Money saving is questionable in this forum. In my opinion, if you can minimize communication cost, what else cost is business as usual. If you don’t know how to manage it locally, you will not know how to manage it in outsourcing. People talk about meeting and travelling costs. Do you really need travel while internet has provided cheaper and effective face-to-face meetings? If you like to travel, you would have spent the money anyway without outsourcing. The bottom line is how you can create effective communication among partners and minimize the cost to communicate.

Cheers!

Outsourcing doesnt mean YOU doesnt need to know anything and everything will be done sucessfully by the company you outsourced too. By your judgement it seems you are either lazy to learn how to work with a company offshore or just plain dumb. I outsource my work to south-east asian countries and give them a detailed requirement specs doc and 99% of the time they deliver the exact thing and always meet the deadline.

Thanks for sharing your experience. You make a valid point about the need for greater documentation with an Indian development team:

“You must fully document everything you need them to get done in painstaking detail. Sometimes almost to the point of actually coding it yourself. They would often have to rework it 2-3 times after code reviews were done.”

However, I think your bad experience reflects the quality of the specific team you recruited. As I’ve said in previous comments, India is a big country, with tens of millions joining the IT workforce annually. The size of the labor pool (and more importantly, the demand for it) has lead to challenges with education, training, and overall quality.

But, it’s all about learning how to do it right. There are recruiting, training, and peer mentorship strategies that can instill a creative, self-motivated mindset in your team.

“I didn’t experience much in the way of creativity or innovation from my team in India. They wanted to be told exactly what needed to be done in detail and did not feel comfortable adding new ideas.”

I appreciate you pointing out that this was partly your responsibility. But, more than that, offshore work is an emerging management skill - a new job description, complete with its own cultural nuances and challenges based on distance.

And, thankfully, pockets of people are learning to do it right. Once a critical mass of people get it, India will be well on its way.

A short story of my company’s experiences in this area. Management decided to embrace the idea of sending many of the operational jobs to India in order to save money. So they actually created a new company in India to facilitate this and moved many of the clerical jobs to India with great success. The work is getting done and they are saving money. So, it stands to reason that they should start forcing IT to do the same thing. After all, if data entry is able to make it work, it should also work for IT application development.

I was then told to hire app dev resources in our India office. It quickly became apparent to me that India was going to take alot more care and feeding than my US folks. You must fully document everything you need them to get done in painstaking detail. Sometimes almost to the point of actually coding it yourself. They would often have to rework it 2-3 times after code reviews were done.

I didn’t experience much in the way of creativity or innovation from my team in India. They wanted to be told exactly what needed to be done in detail and did not feel comfortable adding new ideas. (In hindsight, this may have been partly my fault. But I did my best to encourage it). It was at this point that I realized that all my US development resources were spending all their time documenting what needed to be done and passing it off to India. Their productivity (and morale) began to decline. Of course, management was all over me because it was not showing the huge savings and productivity they were getting in data entry. Totally unrealistic expectations.

I began working with other offshore solutions elsewhere. Particularly in Mexico and Romania. Mexico is nice because of the timezone and cheap travel. Mexico seems to have a good pool of developers but Romania seems to have a bit more technical experience. Prices are in line with India. I literally spend half of the time documenting and explaining what needs to be done vs India. Code quality is magnitudes better. They also seem to be alot more aggressive and creative than India.

With the results we achieved in Mexico and Romania, I was able to convince mgt to stop using India.

It can be done effectively if you find the right situation for your company and the way you work. It wasn’t easy for me or my team.

Good luck.

I have to admit that I’m currently “on the fence” with regards to outsourcing an upcoming project. Although I am fully capable of developing all aspects of the project myself, I would certainly welcome any outside assistance to shrink the development window.

But its truly funny to see this and realize that this does happen

Haris (www.zigron.com)

Cricket Humor - visit http://jokecricket.blogspot.com/

In the US, you can make complaints to the BBB, and they are recorded on the company’s permanent record. Fraudulent companies die out very quickly.

If India continues operating without some sort of official Blacklist of Shame for much longer, I think they might start seeing less business.