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Outsourcing is definitely not an easy thing to do. I have seen plently of failed and successful projects. Before I get into any further detail, I would like to share a story of a consultant who went through offshore outsourcing tranisition phase. John Doe, a friend of mine, a top notch project manager and a developer. Couple years back, he wanted to get his hands on Offshore Software Development mainly because of cost effectiveness. He started with a small project to get some experience with offshore outsourcing.
He started with comparing several vendors who provide offshore programming resources at a ridiculously cheap rate. He wanted to start small so hired one developer for 15-day trial period. He asked that developer to make a small tasklist application with ajax effects. He quickly wrote brief requirements and sent it to that developer. Project started in few days but at the end of 15 days, it did not worked out well for him. He complained to that offshore company and they immediately replaced that programmer. He retried by sending same requirements to the other programmer and ended up getting the same result. Without analyzing the situation, he switched to another company. This happened thrice. He was unable to figure out what went wrong.
Few weeks later, I met him in a coffee shop and he told me this whole story. He was totally against the idea of offshore outsourcing. I told him that I have been involved with offshore programmers for more than 4 years and I found this practice not only profitable but also effective. I told him that if he has time some day, we can sit down and discuss these requirements and communication, he had with those developers. Few days later, we met to go over these requirements. I brought some of my sample requirements doc and some emails that I exchanged with my team. After going through his documents, we compared mine. He realized that it was him that didn't spell out each and every bit of detail to his resource. I even asked him how many times he exchanged an email or make calls to that developer. I was surprised to hear that he had zero calls or instant messages with him.
Here are some of the things that we found to be causes:
1) The developer has only these specs that he provided to follow and they stick with it. They don't think outside what is given to them. The one thing that these developers don't have is your insight, the real life picture of the business case so they can't think like you or observe the problem like you can. It doesn't matter if they are onshore and offshore. You need to communicate these scenarios to them in any shape or form.
2) Creating specs, and explaining that to developer through email doesnt get the job done. You have to get involved in every process. IM and Online meetings are really helpful.
3) Project Management is your job, remember they can't manage this the way you wanted it to be managed.
You should not outsource project management unless you have a PM offshore. It takes some time to transition project management to offshore. I have been there done that. If outsourcing was that easy from the day one, everyone would be doing it. It takes time and experience to learn this skill, but it's worth the trouble if you plan to do several projects. It can be very profitable in long run.
So how did John Doe get into the situation above?
He outsourced everything including project management and decision making.
How did things work out for John Doe?
He had mixed results. John Doe pushed the programmer to finish the project. He did save a few dollars, even after giving a small bonus to the programmer. But the program did not really meet expecations.
It shows, you get what you pay for. Hiring the people doesnt mean that task will get done. You have to have a plan, a process, a strategy that your people can follow.
Overall, John would have been better off to pay a bit more for work by hiring a IT Liaison/Onshore Tech who deals with offshore every single day. That way, he would get what he wanted from the programmer, not what he could get out of him. It would be costly though.
That's all for now, I will get into more scenarios of Offshore outsourcing.
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WebDevelopment, Outsourcing