Pragmatic Outsourcing

A few months ago I went through a vendor selection process for a technology company in SF Bay Area. The goal was to find a vendor that would become a long-term partner / a part of a local development team. My clients were set on considering only two countries – India and China.

The size of a potential outsourcing deal was fairly small: ~15 people. That would roughly correspond to $1M on annual basis. The size of engagement was still big enough to give us a chance to pick a company from a large pull of vendors who seemed to be interested. Here are some observations based on our analysis:

Rates

In both countries we saw a plenty of companies prepared to compete on price and go very low just to get the deal. Larger / more mature companies had notably higher rates, many of them with very similar message “We are by far not the cheapest but we are the best”. Considering companies we liked the rates for India depending on position and company were roughly between $20 and $35 an hour with blended rate for our team ~$30; the rates for China were roughly between $15 and $30 an hour with blended rate for our team ~$20;

Access to Resources

Access to resources in high-tech centers of India is getting increasingly complex, finding It talent ion cities such as Bangalore is almost as complex as in San Francisco. Outsourcing companies also have to compete with subsidiaries and offshore divisions of multinational corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, etc.

We still were surprised with how difficult and slow the sourcing process was. It seemed that finding even mainstream roles such as .NET developers or Winrunner QA guys was practically impossible.

We found that access to resources in China was not as complex. It appeared that companies in China were able to staff up for a project 3-5 times faster than India companies. In example confirmed by the references it took 2 months to build a 30 FTE team versus 9 months for the same by Indian Tier 1 InfoSys.

Resource Quality

The companies with $5M-$20M revenue range (our target based on scope of outsourcing) fall in a group of 3rd to 5th tier companies with inevitable impact on their access to resources which is exacerbated by general scarcity of IT talent. So it was not a surprise for us to see very poor quality of resources. Our average “hit rate” (number of people we would consider for “hire” vs. people presented to us by the vendors) was 1 out of 4.

Companies with the same $5M-$20M revenue range are the first/second tier companies in China with top pick in off campus hiring as well as other methods of employee sourcing. We saw that as a solid, and possibly the most important, advantage for Chinese firms. However our hit ratio was even lower than in India – 1 out of 5.5 due to serious communication / language handicap.

Concentrating only on those resources who we considered potential “hires” we saw a decent blend of theoretical and practical knowledge with some diversity in skills / background / experience in India. Our potential “hires” in China showed rather weak theoretical knowledge across the board. Their practical skills were solid yet extremely narrow; most of the “good” people we talked with were “pigeonholed”, and did not seem to mind.

Employee Turnover

Getting honest information about turnover, retention and attrition seemed practically impossible so we got the numbers from unsolicited references rather than from the vendors.

Most of the large s/w outsourcing companies in India have turnover rates exceeding 30%. Attrition is particular high in large centers such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi. For small companies it is not unusual to see offshore staff turnover rates exceeding 50%.

Turnover rates in China outsourcing industry are under 25%. The companies that were selected claimed to have attrition rate about 15%. We saw low attrition rates as probably one of the greatest advantages of China over India.

Communications

There is no comparison in communication skills of consulting work force in India and China. Command of English language for majority of people we interviewed in India was far stronger than mine. In China the situation was opposite, more so the more skilled and senior the resource the lower his/her language skills.

Language in just one of many dimensions of communication. There are many skills important for bridging cultural differences and communication gaps. When it comes to dealing with USA companies Indian consultants have a huge lead on Chinese in many aspects, just to name a few:

• Body language / facial expressions – much easier to understand and follow
• Overall presentation skills
• Understanding of professional lingo
• Grasp on general rules of professional communications and office etiquette

With communications being one of the most important aspects of majority outsourcing initiatives India have a huge lead on China.

Mindset & Work Ethics

Talking with a large group of reference accounts (including unsolicited) gave us an interesting insight into mindset and work ethics of development teams in India and China. Here are a couple things that people had general agreement upon when it comes to resources from Indian vendors:

• A mindset of typical outsourcing company is oriented towards revenue / profit and is focusing employees towards “billing hours” rather than customer satisfaction or success of the project.
• High turnover rates and general acceptance of job hopping have devastating impact on resource’s attitude and work ethics.
• Majority of consultants have over-inflated expectations in terms of their seniority, type of work they should be doing, and a speed of promotion.

We heard much more favorable assessment of mind set and work ethics for Chinese workforce:

• With aggressive market share oriented drive of China s/w outsourcers employees of these companies are focused on high productivity and customer satisfaction.
• Workdays of 10-12 hours are not at all unusual (note that billing is typically negotiated on monthly basis with 8 hour workdays).
• There is a strong prevalence of team values over individual.

The workforce work ethics present one of great advantages of the outsourcing companies in China. Combined with lower levels of flexibility in job market (partially due to the country’s political and economical structure) the work ethic to some degree offsets luck of knowledge and experience.

Total Cost of Outsourcing

And finally – Total Cost of Outsourcing (TCO). TCO is the cost that accommodates for the communication overhead, lower productivity, and all other costs that are not reflected in the rate. In a large degree assessing the TCO requires substantial experimental data with a specific vendor. Based on a survey of the references during this engagement, my own experience and experience of similar companies in terms of the structure and the scope of outsourcing we came up with interesting numbers presented below. The numbers are presented as a percentage of savings / losses over typical full time employee rates: