Outsourcing SMO
Search Media Optimization / Outreach has become one of the most popular traffic building activities to outsource. And paraphrasing comment on my previous post, when it comes to finding a qualified needle in a freelancing haystack SMO is even more challenging than SEO and others activities alike. First, a couple words on typical aspects of SMO, here are just a few things that you can consider:
- Building Twitter follower crowd and posting ongoing tweets to the community you’ve created
- Creating Profiles on Social Networks, generating “friends”, update of status / spam friends with info
- Creating SM advertising campaigns using follow / vote / fun tools
- Bookmaking the target using sharing engines such as StumbleUpon
- As well as traditional resources such as forums
Each of these activities present a fairly easily outsourced task, at least it appears to. For example you can create a mascot for you’re your service. That mascot can have its own twitter page. Using variety of available tools and offshore labor you can
Outsourcing Blog SEO
I had several interesting discussions about blog SEO outsourcing with a few of my friends a colleagues. I think some highlights of those discussions deserve a full size post or two. Since we are talking about blogs I just have to start with some classic points. Trisha Okubo did a phenomenal job covering those in her almost classic “Blog Your Brand”
In case you did not read the presentation, here are the main points:
Updates to the List of Freelancing Sites
In case you found Best Places to Find a Freelancer helpful you may want to check out the updated list. It now has 42 entries and also includes Google PR and Alexa ratings. These two numbers are quite helpful indicators of traffic. Google rating is a mystery number that measures from 0 (I guess “O” is for obscurity) to 10. Sites with PR 0 are typically brand new, inactive or have been penalized by Google for applying “black hat” SEO techniques. Sites with high PR are active members of web community, with a lot of traffic, popular content, and large number of quality back links. There are a lot of theories and speculation behind what determines PR, ask any SEO expert and you will get an ear full. How much of that would be true is a big question though. Many of PR rating aspects are kept secret by Google for a very good reason.
Alexa rating is much more strait forward measure, it goes from 1 – top rating to I do not know how many gazillions or zero, what apparently means the same. The higher the number the lower the rating. So there is practically no limit to how bad the could rate on Alexa. With Alexa rating being fairly simplistic there are plenty of ways a company can increase it by buying traffic and other means, that to a degree decreases the value of rating, however it’s still one of the best, easy to understand measures. Generally, Alexa rating consider low and a site practically irrelevant if the site doesn’t appear in Alexa 100,000. I would not recommend dismissing the sites with low rating though. Low Alexa rating means a bad news for the company’s traffic. On the other hand it could mean less vendor competition / niche market / and so on for you. However, for you convenience I will soon add a list sorted in Alexa rating linked from the table header, stay tuned :)
Here are the top five by Alexa rating (as of 2/1/2010)
| Site | PR | Alexa | Brief Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| www.craigslist.org | 7 | 37 | Oh should I say anything here? |
| www.elance.com | 6 | 628 | Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively. Founded in 1999, Elance was established to help small businesses easily and efficiently hire freelance talent. Today, Elance is the leading workplace for hiring and working on demand. Elance is privately-held and headquartered in Mountain View, California. |
| www.odesk.com | 6 | 709 | oDesk enables buyers to hire, manage (that’s different from many other similar services), and pay technology service providers from around the world. The service is fairly well organized, fast and reasonably priced – that’s if you are prepared to pay fees. Last time I looked at it the brokerage fees were 10% of the contract. |
| www.GetAFreelancer.com | 6 | 844 | GetAFreelancer.com claims to be one of the largest sites of its kind. It indeed earned a decent reputation in freelancing community. You can find a large number of freelance programmers, web designers, copywriters and translators at that site. |
| www.rentacoder.com | 6 | 1,908 | The site has about 20,000 registered buyers. When you get a project done through Rentacoder you put the entire project fees into an escrow account. You don’t release the fees until the project is complete. This is good because it gives reassurance to the coder that they are going to pay you |
Best of luck and let me know if you find sites that are worth including in the list.
Search for SEO Experts
Search for SEO under Hire professional in eLance returns about 12,000 results, search under Projects returns about 600. So it’s roughly 20 providers per SEO project. Similar stats are on Guru, oDesk, GAF, etc. One would assume that I should have zero problems finding a professional for my SEO project, especially in this market and being a buyer with good standing… The project started a couple weeks ago and in theory, I should have found the provider by now, in reality I have not. In theory there is no difference between theory and reality, in reality there is… Well, here is a brief of my recent project:
I decided to see what a couple standard SEO operations would to my blog traffic put a project on eLance, Guru, and oDesk. These sites have very different community of suppliers and I expected responses different in multiple aspects. Considering cumulative value of decently designed SEO campaign I was prepared to pick several suppliers. My project was very simple, here is its slightly abbreviated version:
Microsoft and Plurk outsourcing debacle
If your goals are not achievable you can use them as targets. Sounds like a strange proposition? Well, look at Microsoft – everyone and their brother love to use it as a target of hate, criticism, etc. It’s human nature – to consider success of others as own failure. Fortunately, Microsoft never ceases to offer opportunities for harsh and well deserved criticism.
This time it’s quite amazing: as Plurk, a startup in micro-blogging sense, pointed in their blog “Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world. Yes, we’re talking about Microsoft.”
As it turned our recently launched Microsoft service Juku borrowed much more than inspiration from Plurk, it used very much everything including source code.
Initially Microsoft seemed uncertain about what happened yet shortly after the news hit the blogosphere suspended Juku and issued apologies to Plurk. “Because questions have been raised about the code base comprising the service, MSN China will be suspending access to the Juku beta feature temporarily while we investigate the matter fully.” see more here.
Stuff happens, even with the best of us. No reason to beat the dead horse here. What is interesting and particular important for the topic of my blog is that the code theft appears to be linked to Microsoft outsourcing practices, see Microsoft Statement Regarding MSN China Joint Venture’s Juku Feature “The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied.”
I am sure that we’ll never know exactly what exactly happen. In my opinion the chances are that Microsoft outsourcing partner did something that we call R&D – rob and duplicate, and under pressures of budget / timelines / etc. did not even make efforts to cover its tracks. The theft most likely happen at a very low level of the food chain – maybe just a few developers removed from the MS headquarters by 100s of layers of corporate hierarchy, maybe a product manager making a misleading request “make it like Plurk”, it might have been simple translation error … never the less the giant company is now have to accept responsibility for the mistake that in its relative size to the company decision volume would be equivalent to a drop of water in a sea. I would not even attempt to put a price tag on this debacle… well someone in MS will have to.
Anyway, there is an important lesson here: do you know what your vendor is doing? Do you know whether code came from? Was there any lines borrowed from a competitor, innocent bystander, or open source? That issue is relevant to all your employees (something borrowed from a prior employer?), yet by far is much more serious when it comes to outsourcing.
I came across it on multiple occasions – from code to “research” produced by consultants. In many cases finding plagiarism was not difficult, I am sure that in many cases I missed it as well, especially if the contributor was smart enough to remove comments, or paraphrase.
As you can see from MS example that issue is of very serious of nature and should be of grave concern. Make sure that you educate your team and include plagiarism analysis in your code review process, at least on an occasional audit basis.
Things Not to Outsource Even Though They Say You Should
“51 ways”, “101 tips”, and even “1000 and 1 ideas” on how to Outsource your Life. It seems like there is a non-stop competition in blogosphere to come up with a bigger list. Of course VA companies promoting wonders of life outsourcing directly or through “independent” blogs add their list of ideas and justifications. No matter whether you agree with him or not you gotta give it to Timothy Ferriss, he’s a true trend-setter.
While there are many ways to outsource most annoying aspects of your professional and personal life working with VAs is by no means a panacea for all your errands and chores. I will cover rules for “not outsourcing” in another post, at this point I just wanted to highlight a few areas that VA firms would suggest you outsource while you really should not. The list below is fairly small mainly because I wanted to concentrate on tasks that are highly advertised as VA-friendly tasks while they are not. So, here it goes
10 Things Not to Outsource Even Though They Say You Should
1. Website development. If website is primitive, it takes just knowledge of MS word and few clicks to create a website. If you have no clue how to do even that you should spend a few hours googling, otherwise you are leaving yourself wide open to fraud and over-billing. If the website is very simple yet above a one-pager you probably will spend more time explaining to VA what you want then creating it yourself using DreamWeaver or FrontPage, and if website is a bit higher in complexity you will be lucky to get your money and time worth by working with VA. Find professionals – there are plenty of them (see ideas on how to find one in Best Places to Find a Freelancer.
Outsourcing Your Life – the Scope of Outsourcing
Well, there are a few, if not a lot of hidden traps in the methodology Timothy proposes. I bet the rate of success in following Tim’s footprints is quite low. As a matter of fact if I cared I could write a set of rebuttal articles on many of T propositions ;) What’s good in doing something like that though? I love T’s passion and with the best to those who try, I am sure with number of his readers in millions he’ll make 1000s happy NRs (Nouveau Riche / New Rich).
So, forget questionable suggestions and dubious propositions… There are plenty of great ideas in the book, most of them are time proven as they have been around for a very long time and even popularized by self-improvement industry giants such as Tony Robbins.
One of the areas close in topic of this blog is about outsourcing – outsourcing your life. While outsourcing one’s life is a very generic topic I decided to cover several aspects of it as they apply well to people in my line of work.
The idea is quite simple – using personal assistants to free up time for more meaningful activities. In particular virtual assistants (VAs). What you do with the time freed up by VA is 100% up to you, hopefully it more than pays for the money you pay to VA – either in hard cash or in quality of life.
So, what can be outsourced to VA? Well, almost anything that fits the following criteria:
- The task can be done remotely / doesn’t require physical presence.
- You can provide a definition of the tasks that doesn’t leave too much room for interpretation.
- It takes (substantially) longer to do it than explain how to do it.
- You can provide clear deliverable, timeframe and quality standards for the task execution.
- The task doesn’t require unique skills / abilities / background.
I compiled a couple lists after reading few posts, blogs and article first one is about your professional life (see 25 Aspects of Professional Life to Outsource) and second about your personal life (10 Aspects of Personal Life to Outsource).
Also while reading posts / books and articles I came up with the list of tasks not to outsource despite the fact that those are highly recommended by other authors. The list is not complete. I will post it as soon as it’s ready.
10 Aspects of Personal Life to Outsource
The list below covers a variety of personal tasks that could be reasonably easy outsourced to a Virtual Assistant.
1. Vacation Planning. Pick a destination and have VA to book your tickets, find hotel, arrange pick up / drop off, car, excursions, etc. VA can develop plan of your trip to excruciating level of details.
2. Event Planning – Evite.com is a great tool for event planning but adding a human touch can greatly improve the experience. Especially if you meeting with a large group of not very close friends. VA can cover multiple aspects of event – meal planning, finding a catering company, arranging entertainment, etc. VA can also support people coming to the event, e.g. finding great place to stay for your parents in law.
3. Online Shopping – With online shopping becoming mainstream of shopping adding a VA can save you tons of time and surprisingly a lot of money. Whether you shopping for skis, used car or groceries price research alone will pay for all your VA costs.
4. Contractor research, selection and managing – whether it’s a plumber, wedding band, landscaper VA can assist you with finding one, negotiating terms, setting appointments and following up with providers.
5. Preventive maintenance of your assets. Do you remember that garage doors need to be greased twice a year? VA can create and maintain maintenance plan for all your assets and make sure that you do not forget that oil change for your car, schedule appointment and follow up if necessary.
6. Health and Fitness – Let VA being your “loving Jewish mother” in every good aspect of it (and there are plenty of those). Diet planning, schedule your annual checkup, finding you a chiropractor or personal trainer, and reminding to wear your sweater.
7. Personal Social Networking – many aspects of our personal social lives can benefit from VA involvement. Never forget to send flowers to your grandmother, stay in touch with your friends, and even remember about your friend’s son graduation party.
8. You love life :) – Let VA help you with maintaining your online profile(s), respond to those interested, set up date, buy gifts, etc. You might become a Virtual Casanova in no time!
9. Bill management – VA can audit your bills and pay them exactly on time, save time and late fees.
10. Cost management. While working with your bills VA can take it further and undertake cost management finding savings for you in multiple aspects of your spending. For example they can do analysis of your cell phone bill and find a better plan.
25 Aspects of Professional Life to Outsource
The list below covers a variety of tasks that could be reasonably easy outsourced to a Virtual Assistant.
1. Industry / Market / Vendor / Product Research. Even though you can ask your VA to check library you are better off keeping the research to Web though. Research could be of a broad nature, for example top 5 firewall vendors, or very focused such as Nick Krym cell phone number.
2. Subject Matter Briefs – If you’ve ever been scheduled for a meeting on a topic about which you know very little, a virtual assistant can be a great help. Have them find or write a short, five-page summary of the topic, major concerns and implications for you, and recent news.
3. Calendar Management – setting appointments, making calls, rescheduling meetings, reminders, etc.
4. Contact management – cleaning up your outlook contact database, verifying / finding facts, addresses, emails, etc.
5. Email Management – email removing unnecessary (spam, useless elements of chain email, etc.), sorting, categorizing, follow up, response on your behalf, etc. – possibilities and time savings here are pretty amazing.
Too Much of Good Thing
A few days ago starting from a comment to my post I found a very interesting discussion of metrics on 360° Vendor Management. In his post Tony covered a few golden rules that are important to consider when introducing metrics in vendor management. I agree in general with most of the principles covered in the post and highly recommend looking at it as well as other materials publish in the blog.
While reading the post I came across of one phrase that triggered a serious of thoughts that I want to cover today. (Metrics allow you “Moderate expensive overperformance that the vendor need not do. Remember – you pay for the extra quality, which may not be tangible.” )
There are multiple negative aspects for vendor over-performance that you should consider:
First Metrics
For some reason this month turned out the highest traffic in the history of this blog. It is particular interesting considering that I have not been doing a good job keeping it updated. So I feel obligated to add at least one post before December.
Let me cover some progress I made with my offshore provider I inherited through the M&A process. In particular let me cover some metrics we have established in order to control the relationship. This set of metrics is a preliminary set based primarily on what my vendor could easily retrieve from the tracking systems they already have in place.
A couple months ago we agreed on several metrics and established high level benchmarks. I believe that you can not enforce benchmarks on day one. You should setup goals and see whether they are reasonable to achieve considering multiple factors ranging from abilities of vendor and your own organization to quality of the tools that are used to collect the info.
Here are the metrics we have collected so far:
People Factor
I do not know how many times one of my managers or I said something like “Darn employees… Can’t live with them, can’t live without them either…” Almost all issues one faces in management career come from employees, well, very much all the issues are solved by employees as well. Every time when you deal with yet another personnel issue you throw your hands in air asking why it can’t be simple at least once in a while. Well whether you want it or not Murphy rules and if everything appears going well that only means that you are missing something.
For some reason (premonition?) I was thinking about this the Saturday before Thanksgiving week. The thought was so strong and persistent that I decided to sit down with my notebook and take a quick walk through the list of ongoing projects and open issues. The timing, from some twisted standpoint, was perfect – approaching long weekend, many people on vacation traveling, end of month, oncoming deadline for a number of high visibility projects. Nope, neither the list of projects nor the list of open issues, nor any other list I looked over gave me any reason for extra concern. Relived to the point of complacency I went on with my usual weekend chores.
Pragmatic Outsourcer, v. 1.0
The first volume of Pragmatic Outsourcer – the book primarily based on the materials of this blog is almost ready. There still a few things to clean up, pictures to pick, codes to request but I can see the light in the end of tunnel. The volume is going to be published as e-book and available as free download from this site.
The first volume is dedicated to the first step in outsourcing – making the decision – and that’s probably the most important step. The word “decision” comes from Latin “” meaning to cut. To make the decision means to cut other options. Many people do not look at decisions in such dramatic manner, in a way “let’s get married and if it doesn’t work out we’ll divorce”. Well, that’s a valid perspective, at least for some people. Of course any decision, even easily reversible has its consequences in many cases making reversibility quite expensive. Offshore decision is one of those thus one should chose wisely…
Choose well, your choice is brief, and yet endless. [Goethe]
I believe book format works better for delivery and consumption of material that is covered in this blog, yet it has its issues as well. In some way e-book is a static snapshot of one’s thought process while blog is a near real time stream. So both forms are important and would bring a better set of tools to the reader. That’s why I decided to take the effort to create the book.
Creating the book turned out to be harder than I thought even though a large portion of content was readily available. When you deliver material one random chapter you do not need to worry about blind spots (important material not covered), structure, consistency, etc. All that becomes a serious concern and takes substantial time to address.
With my ESL handicap I also have to deal with challenges of style, grammar, etc. that for some reason I decided to take much more serious than in this blog. I guess having ISBN number assigned to the written word raises the bar, at least in my mind. In that arena I had to seek professional help which naturally came from offshore. Eat your own dog food so to say.
Anyway, I am pretty excited and hope to put the first volume in front of you shortly and then immediately proceed to the second one – vendor selection. Hopefully in not so distant future the full scope of offshore outsourcing from decision to termination will be covered in the series of e-books I have in mind. And then… if the traffic to e-book justifies it I would love to put all my Tips, Tricks and Traps of IT Outsourcing in a hard or even better paper cover… for dummies or unleashed series… ha.. judging by what it takes to create e-book publishing in-print must be a very tough journey, so the traffic must be really good to justify it.
Invisibility Cloak of MSA
A Master Service Agreement (MSA) is intended to create a contractual framework for relationships between parties involved. Unfortunately way too often MSAs are used to protect intentional incompliance with a spirit of the agreement. When MSA is written and negotiated the parties bring to the table their knowledge of the domain, in this case offshore outsourcing services. The party more experienced in the space can predict certain behaviors and relationship patterns and appropriately protect themselves from liabilities they bring. More so that party can take advantage of less experienced negotiating partner and create an invisible cloak that will be used to hide issues and drive higher profit from the contract.
I am afraid that sounds very theoretical, vogue and convoluted… Let me suggest a couple of examples:
- As a service provider I know that customer is likely to be late on their deliverables and my team would be spinning wheels waiting on those deliverables. To protect myself from that potentially serious issue I will put a clause in MSA that would state that if I am waiting on the customer I am still getting paid. That’s just fair, isn’t it? Now, consider what I can do during negotiations – I can downplay the probability of customer delays (most likely using customer’s ego) and shape that clause in a manner that gives me a lot of flexibility. Then, when the opportunity presents itself I can induce waiting period and rip the benefits that already embedded in the MSA.
- Another, probably most common area, is related to provider dealing with the resources on their side. There are many areas where supplier can negotiate “reasonable” terms that have nothing to do with reality of the situation. For example, if a software developer quits another developer would be put in his/her place and ramp up period should be the industry’s standard 2 weeks. Industry standard? When I bring onboard a new developer it takes 2-3 month for him / her to become fully productive how come it takes four times less with an offshore guy? That’s not the point though, no matter how many weeks of shadowing you might negotiate the realities of delivery against the item in MSA remain practically unknown, and thus could be manipulated to fit provider’s objectives.
- Even a very straightforward items like “body count” becomes pretty vogue and unenforceable. Imagine that you are trying to count people in organization and people always move from one office to another. Getting the numbers right would be quite challenging. Just a few weeks ago i spend almost a week trying to figure out how many QA engineers I have on staff with my Indian offshore operations. The numbers varied greatly depending on who I’d ask. Most precise figures came from the vendor, in that light resorting to MSA as a lifesaver is only natural. Yet, if you think that if my development manager thinks that there are 2 QA engineers on his project while my provider tells me that there are 5, something is seriously wrong here. I bet it means that I get the work of 2 while paying for 5…
In general what makes an MSA an invisibility cloak is not bad intentions of the vendor, but buyer’s inability or lack of desire to enforce it by staying on the top of engagement. If you do not control the deliverables each step along the way, if you do not verify timesheets and assignments, if you hope that the MSA will prevent me from issues and problems of malicious or delinquent nature you will most likely fail. In that case the MSA will become opaque and impenetrable defense mechanism for the vendor. I guess Invisibility is in the eye of the beholder.
Steps to making an MSA transparent are obvious – focus on execution, control of deliverables, etc. Considering an example of team turnover. A realistic ramp up for a developer in terms of productivity would be 25% first month, 50% second, 75% third and 100% from that point on. In that case over 12 months developer produce 1050% of the monthly allocation. Suppose a developer quits after 6 months and spends one month training a shadow resource (it’s reasonable to assume that that between two of them productivity for that month is 100%). In that case total productivity over the year will be 975% or ~7% less. If we have two replacements over the year the figures would be 900% or ~14% loss of productivity.
That could be easily translated to the rate impact – if your rate for the developer was negotiated at $25 per hour in the second case you paid roughly $27 and $29 in the third. Of course not controlling these figures makes the difference invisible… The magic spell to make the cloak transparent would include linking turnover baseline to rate and more important watching it over the case of the engagement.
A Few Words on UAT
This post continues with the topic I started a few months ago – using QA to prevent serious issues with offshore deliverables. In particular I’d like to cover User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
For many software professional UAT has a very clear definition and lucid goals and objectives, yet this understanding at most foundational level varies a lot between different professionals and organizations. In professional services engagements UAT I had pleasure to participate in UAT used to be a final sign off by buyer of the software deliverable. In my new organization UAT has been playing a key role in SDLC acting as a final gate before release to production. In many organizations UAT is interpreted as a smoke test performed by users at each milestone to make sure that the users’ requirements were properly understood.
Whatever the test performed in your organization with a UAT label it is probably an important part of your SDLC and I am not disputing its value. I am also not an abbreviation fanatic demanding that UAT term is only used its original purpose. I think it would be quite important to cover participation of users in the acceptance of deliverables from offshore, and just for the sake of this post let me call those testing activities UAT.
Offshore QA and a Sly Fox
A fairly common model for working with an offshore vendor for SaaS companies is based on black box model – the requirements collected locally go to offshore team and code ready for production comes back, sometimes in a form of binaries. There are variations to that model with the same common thread – the full responsibility for development of the application and its quality assurance belongs to with the vendor.
Can this approach work with an arbitrary software development shop? Absolutely! As a matter of that is the model used by all ISVs that do not employ offshore, so model works for sure. The question is whether offshore components in that model make the difference worth discussing, and unfortunately they do. The fundamental laws of outsourcing (FLO) affect efficiency and reliability of the model to a great extend, often making the model completely unreliable.
There are so many things that can go wrong inside of the proverbial black box turning it more into a Pandora’s Box:
- Communications issues and information loss at every handover
- Ever deteriorating quality of the resources
- Inevitable deterioration of the quality of code
- Growing blind spots in test coverage
- And so on – you can continue this list ad nauseum
Offshore BC & DR
Thinking about Nostradamus predictions for 2012 and all cataclysms that will strike that year? Afraid and developing your bullet proof Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC&DR) plans? Well, if meteors, super-volcanoes, and melting ice caps flatten, burn, and flood most of humanity those BC&DR plans won’t matter much. However, increasingly more powerful floods, hurricanes and earthquakes with enormous toll remind us about vulnerability of even rich nations such as the USA, Canada, or China…
As I pointed out in Force Majeure working with offshore organizations increases risk of substantial losses bring up the importance of having solid BC&DR plans. Of course if you are working with a mature offshore partner they would have their own BC&DR plans. That’s great with one important caveat – will these BC & DR plans work when needed?
It was not long ago when supposedly invincible 365 Main Data Center in SF went lights out for a considerable period of time after a scheduled (!) black out. So there are a number of questions you need to answer:
- Does you offshore vendor has solid BC&DR plans?
- How often are theytested?
- What are the KPIs / metrics associated with these plans?
- Are those metrics sufficient for your business?
- Who audits these plans and activities? (You won’t take the vendor word on it, would you?)
Well probably the first set of questions you should address to yourself or your IT team responsible for BC & DR. Interestingly enough for many, especially small companies the answers from internal team are likely to be much weaker than those from offshore. And as a matter of fact for some offshore is the BC & DR plan.
After you covered two main points you need to check the route between them. There are many aspects to connectivity between offshore and onshore. Things can get lost on the way, connectivity may drop (if major cables are damaged for quite some time as it happen with India couple years ago). But even more important is to make sure that was sent to you is indeed what you expected and that it is what you received. Wrong code pushed to production (happens even to Google) is sometime more serious disaster than interruption in service. That gets into an area that deserves a lot of discussions by itself – QA and in particular acceptance testing. I will cover it in a couple of posts in the future.
One more major aspect to consider – what if the relationship between you and the vendor go sour? In one or another way – you did something wrong, vendor decided to rob you of your IP, etc. There are plenty of sad examples. That kind of disaster is most difficult to deal with. And with them being as unpredictable as the Acts of God you should have solid BC & DR plan for that as well. Starting with solid contractual framework, appropriate and frequent archiving, and so on. Yet you can’t be ready for everything – losing key resources, knowledge transfer cost, etc. Not easy to deal with, sometimes practically impossible. However there is a good news, when it comes to these kind of diseases I know very reliable medicine – Disposable Outsourcing.
Force Majeure
Force Majeure (French for “superior force”), is a common clause in contracts which essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term “act of God” (e.g., flooding, earthquake, volcano), prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract.
While working with offshore teams, in particular in countries that are subject to severer environmental conditions such as Bangladesh or Philippines you should never forget about how real Force Majeure is. For my pet project wwhow.com I use support of freelancers from Philippines in SEO and data entry tasks via oDesk service. Here is an email I just received from one of my providers –
Dear Nick,
We had experienced a typhoon Ketsana that hits our area tremendously last Saturday morning since then our power was cut due to heavy rains and floods. Floods were everywhere including in our home. Power was restored last night. In this regard, the two accounts were not able to finish the working hours load for the week.
Rest assured this week, we will continue to post quality deals and able to finish work load. I apologize for this unavoidable circumstances.
–
Kind regards,
Jennifer
Environmental Fears
As I mentioned in At Doorsteps of a New Engagement I have a new vendor to deal with. It is a company that has been working with my team for over two years and thus it’s only new for me. It took about a few days for me to encounter the first set of issues. And that set came from the area so common that it’s worth a post by itself – software environments. Below is an email which I was cc’ed on –
Subject: RE: WCM Publish failed
Ravi,
Please explain to me how the production environment does not match what is in UAT. This is unacceptable and must stop. This is not the first time a production turnover did not match UAT.
We need to review our build, turnover, and documentation procedures. This pattern cannot continue.
Looks familiar? I am sure it is…
If you are in business of delivering software as a service or similar to it the chances you will have the following environments: development, QA, staging, production, disaster recovery. You may also have dedicated environments including Build, UAT, Sand Box(es), Performance Lab, etc. If you work with offshore team the chances are some of those environments are duplicated in the offshore offices.
A number of issues arise as environments proliferate:
At Doorsteps of a New Engagement
I finally started working in my new role, VPE / CTO of PDR Network. It took almost a full year of non-stop activities on two complex M&A projects to get to this point. Medem and its assets moved on to two different organizations and I followed one of those assets. “Asset” in this case meaning product, resources, customers, etc. – basically a business unit. Fortunately, I was able to keep some of my top contributors even though far not everyone.
This economy put a huge strain on teams. I had to let go some people who I immensely respect and enjoy working with. Hopefully the new place will provide an opportunity for some of the guys I lost along the way to rejoin. Well, it remains to be seen; at this point I am facing couple disentanglement and technology merge projects that include working with new offshore partners.
PDR Network was formed by merging two assets acquired by a prominent equity firm: Physicians’ Desk Reference, acquired from Thomson Reuters, and the Health Care Notification Network, acquired from Medem. Medem had its offshore partners and Thomson Reuters many of their own. Naturally Medem partnered with small companies and TR with fairly large ones, even though to my surprise not tier 1.
At this point I do not know practically anything about my new outsourcing partners and the challenges they will bring. It feels like you are standing in front of doors to someone’s house and ringing the door bell. From behind the doors you hear a dog barking. What kind of dog is it? Playful Yorkshire terrier, English Bulldog dripping saliva, huge Newfoundland eager to lick you off your feet, vicious Presa Canario ready to rip you apart? It would be great to know before the door opens.
So let me guess what the new vendor will bring to my plate… At this point your guess is as good as mine, the only thing I know of the vendor that they made it to top 20 Indian IT list. Well, I know a little bit about the history and track record, but not much and only at high level / in general terms… So let me put my expectations in writing and see how the actuals pan out:
- Turnover not less than 30%
- Majority of the resources would not pass through interview by on-shore team
- Poor track record of deliverables (late, over budget, low quality)
- Low quality of code (no comments, inefficient code, etc.)
- Low quality of the processes (incompliance with SDLC in many aspects)
- Very inefficient / over-engineered architecture / designs
- Waterfall SDLC with cushy estimates, slow start and high pressure in the end of each engagement
OK, that’s enough for now. I will keep you posted with what I find out discover over next few months.
eBook
The Pragmatic Outsourcer series consists of 5 volumes, each covering a different phase of the outsourcing process. Volume 1: Making the Decision is available today for your free download. Volumes 2 through 5 will be available during 2010.
Read more
Tools & Links
