Another Offshore Manager Daily Routine

1 Reply

daily routineA good friend of mine, Alexey, is an “offshore manager” for a mid-sized technology company with offshore offices in Ukraine. After reading my last post he decided to sent me his daily routine. I put “offshore manager” here in quotes since it’s my friend’s role, not the title. Anyway, in his case ODC is wholly owned by his company, and he has a full time job of overseeing development and QA activities performed by the offshore team.

Interestingly enough, Alexey is not an engineer, but for all intents and purposes is a project manager, very good one. His team in Ukraine is over 60 people and is responsible for product that generates at least 50% of his company revenue. Alexey’s offshore team is doing exceptionally well and is considered one of the key ingredients of the company’s success.

I think in a large degree offshore team success is due to Alexey’s work, leadership and unyielding dedication to quality. And now without further ado let me present slightly edited Alexey’s daily routine –

  • 15 min Categorize (not read) emails received
  • 90 min Participate in up to 3 daily SCRUMs (high risk projects)
  • 30 min After SCRUMs I usually have 1 or 2 one-on-one meetings with my team members scheduled at this time. My goal is to follow up with each tech / QA lead at least once a week, with every other member of the team – every other month. Most often via Skype. Meetings are scheduled in advance as recurring appointments.

Continue reading →

Offshore Manager Daily Routine

Leave a reply

Last night I met with Chris, an old friend of mine who manages relationships with a large group of software developers and QA engineers located in Campinas, Brazil. He’s been working with this team for over a year after being brought in for a short term contract – an offshore “rescue” operation. The relationship between his client and offshore provider was going nowhere quick. Milestones missed, quality of deliverables deteriorating, blame shifting and finger pointing proliferated. The relationship was clearly falling apart and management frustration reached a point where they no longer were prepared to deal with the vendor.

Apparently the history of the offshore relationship for Chris’s client was rather consistent – find a new vendor, go through 3-6 honeymoon period, then things start braking here and there, the company attempts to improve situation by assigning one of the employees, s/he attempts to salvage the situation, but after a some period of temporary improvements things go from bad to worse and the search for a replacement vendor is initiated… and the cycle repeats. By the time Chris came on board his client was on fourth vendor, this time a small company from Brazil.

The problem was “100% with the vendor” – “lack of understanding of the company’s objectives, poor English and overall communication skills, high turnover, mañana attitude, etc., etc.” – at least that what was what the client told Chris.

Continue reading →

The Bottomless Pit of SEO

3 Replies

bottomless-money-pit-seo-If you are a novice blogger, an affiliate, or plan to make a killing by placing Google ads on your site you may believe that SEO will bring you tons of money. It may, but unless you watch every step and invest a great deal of efforts in building the traffic, it won’t.

A couple months ago I started a mid-sized SEO project. I guess by now, after going through a few dozens of SEO engagements I should not be too worried, yet I was. The SEO world has changed a great deal since my last project. Also this time I needed to start from scratch – new site, new for me, very competitive market, and as usual very small budget, both in terms of money and my availability. So, eLance / oDesk here we come.

As it’s typical for SEO engagements I started getting responses to my project almost instantly after I submitted it. 20 or so proposals came in the first hour, about same in next 24 hours, and about a dozen afterwards. Most of the proposals came from India with cost ranging between $5 and $15 an hour. Pretty much all proposals I got were boilerplate documents some of which were slightly modified to acknowledge my name and the project. For follow up I picked about 10 companies with near perfect rating and high number of hours billed in the last year.

Continue reading →

Finding VAs just got easier

2 Replies

Activities that call for out-tasking, ad-hoc outsourcing or “outsourcing your life” inevitably bring us to a not so easy to resolve dilemma – where and how to find a decent virtual assistant (VA). In some cases we can engage resources from oDesk or elance, in some cases we need to find an established VA company. And like with most of vendor selection challenges choosing VA vendor is a task not for the faint of heart. Sheer number of resources that fall into VA category makes proper selection a seemingly daunting task. For example, a search for “virtual assistant” brings 29K entries on oDesk and 19K on eLance.

Interestingly enough an approach here could be using another layer of outsourcing – getting an assistant who can find an assistant… And as luck may have it a few days ago I run into someone who offers exactly that kind of services – Nick Loper, the founder of Virtual Assistant Assistant, the leading directory and customer review database on personal and small business outsourcing companies. Nick also wrote a book “Virtual Assistant Assistant: The Ultimate Guide to Finding, Hiring, and Working with Virtual Assistants” that is now available on Amazon and published a white paper that discusses the current state of the personal outsourcing landscape. Here is a summary in his own words:

It looks at some of the macro trends impacting the industry, including large scale geographic shifts in supply, and the growing confusion over what exactly is a “virtual assistant.”

The study also addresses the demand side of the equation with an analysis of proprietary never-before-released survey data from prospective outsourcing clients. This includes information on desired work functions, anticipated workloads, preferred working relationships, and more.

As demand for outsourcing services has increased, so has interest from venture capitalists. A number of high profile companies and startups have raised funds to grow their business.

Finally, the paper looks at some of the demographic data on website visitors seeking out information on virtual assistants.

Outsourcing service providers may be able to use this data to better cater their offerings to meet the demands of the market.

VA market is going to grow considerably and selecting companies that can match your specific needs would become increasingly different. In that light services like VAA could be extremely helpful. I hope Nick continues growing his business…

Finding a great outsourcing coordinator

1 Reply

About six months ago one of my old friends, VP of Engineering for an East Coast based company, asked me to help him to find a good offshore manager / outsourcing coordinator. That by no means was an easy task and in this case, a not-so-rich relatively small company, it was even more challenging. It took us about two months and few dozens of candidates to find someone who we perceived as a great match. A few weeks later our pick hit the ground running and now, three months after starting the work, he is continuing to exceed our expectations and has proved to be a rock star of an offshore manager. I guess that’s at this point we can give ourselves a pad on a back a look back and see what we did:

First, the task & landscape: the task was to find someone who would manage/coordinates offshore activities for a small product development company. The company’s product, written primarily in Microsoft technologies, has been around for ~15 years and inevitably grew in complexity, size and not so much in quality of code within. Some of the new product development and the lion’s share of maintenance has been outsourced for almost as long as the product development itself. SDLC is a modified waterfall with some elements of agile. The outsourcing team size has fluctuating around average of twenty.
Continue reading →

Staying Healthy – progress update

Leave a reply

A couple months ago I started a “healthy” thread with a discussion about Staying Healthy on the Road, the topic that should be near and dear to most of us involved offshore  and in particular to road warriors.  I guess it’s high time to take the stock of my advancement on the path to better health. Bottom-line-upfront: the progress has been somewhat limited. Nevertheless, I made some progress and am going to continue till I reach my goals. Here where I’ve got myself so far -

  • BMI – I started at 31.6 and assuming 7 lb loss am at 30.6. That still puts me in dreaded “Obesity” category (Normal weight = 18.5-24.9, Overweight = 25-29.9). The good news is that less than 5lb will move me to an Overweight category, I’d say not so bad. Check yours using a BMI calculator.
  • Resting Heart Rate – I consider this is a very important metric. Three month ago I was in “Below Average” group with RHR around 78, today I am in “Average” group with 72. This is a huge step forward. See where you should be at here.
  • VO2max – pretty important metric as well. See Maximal Oxygen Consumption Test (VO2max). I was at 29.47 and am now at 32.14, and that moved me from “Below Average” to “Average”. Not too bad for a couple of months.

Continue reading →

Top Ten Mistakes in Offshore Interviews

2 Replies

I intended to put a bunch of illustrations in my book, but only four pics made it there. Space was the major limiting factor, but I guess one of the pictures, 3 monkeys, was not included because it did not pass the “political correctness” bar. Well, I can imagine that some people in the audience could be offended with the term “code monkey”. There was no derogatory indication there, like there was no intent to portray all managers, including myself, as gorillas ;) the main point was actually quite lucid – it’s difficult to find good engineers, especially when during interviews many of them refuse to listen, see what’s going on, or talk.

Finding good engineers is difficult, especially when you are trying to do that through a third party reaching across thousands of miles via poor VoIP connection. There are not too many really good engineers to begin with, so no surprise here. But the lack of talent is not the point of today’s discussion. What I’d like to touch upon is the mistakes we often make while interviewing developers, mistakes that can result in missing those needles in haystack / diamonds in the rough.

Continue reading →