[thelist] [work] Re: Outsourcing

[Hershel Robinson]

I have now taken this position which I mentioned in January on evolt.

Are you at liberty to share a contact with this company in India?

Thanks,
Hershel

Christian Heilmann wrote:
>>> 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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