[thelist] Outsourcing

Christian Heilmann codepo8 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 30 10:57:44 CST 2006


> > He is looking to hire me (or someone like me) to be a
> > technical manager to oversee the outsourced programmers and
> I would hire be more likely to work with people on this list, WDL and
> CSSD from other countries, rather than to contract with people I've
> never heard of.

Ok, will you match my current wage?

Seriously though, I worked with a company team in India for the last 5
years and it works more or less. However, some things have to be
ensured, and I hate doing most of them:

Disclaimer: Some of this may sound to demeaning to you, it is not
intended that way - all the people in the India office are clever -
they just do what is expected of them. Most of it applies to us as
contractors / time based developers, too.

- Be _very_ specific what you need to be done, explain in easy terms
and with checkpoints  and specific deliveries for each step.
- Don't expect the extra step of thinking - you might end up with a
lot of useless code because you wrote some text that indicates you
wanted it that way.
- Output is more important than quality - everything visual is very
much taken care of - the code that generates it not as much (html/css
issue - I saw hardcoded linebreaks so that the HTML had the same
layout as the JPG copy)
- Give strict timelines and stick to them
- Use the time difference for your advantage - at least from a UK
perspective - if you send out something UK afternoon that asks for
specific output and has all the needed content you will have it next
morning. If you discuss at 2pm here what went wrong the brains in the
India office are already porridge.
- Write guidelines and best practice documents and say upfront that
outcome will be tested against those.

Worked fine for us - for developers. The call centres all moved back
to Ireland.:-)

HTH
Chris
--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/



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