Outsourcing Governance
A couple days ago I received an email with a very interesting question –
Hello Nick,
I have come across your blog (http://pragmaticoutsourcing.com) while doing some secondary research.
I have been quite impressed after reading your blog, and hence writing to you to seek your pro bono help :)
As you have such a good depth and breadth of outsourcing experience, I would like to seek your opinion on this:
- Many Companies who Offshore their IT/Product Development to Russia, India, China, etc. face many challenges during the projects execution phase. They spend significant management overhead in managing their vendors. They may need to make multiple trips to the outsourced location to resolve issues. So there are significant costs/pains involved
– Would such Companies like to hire third-party consultants, who work as their agents and be physically present with the suppliers, does the Program Management function (tracking of projects, timelines of deliveres, identifying and sharing potential issues/challenges, metrics reporting etc.) and help reduce the costs/pains of managing the outsourcing vendor?
– Would such Third-Party Consulting services be attractive to Companies who Offshore?
– If No, Why?
– If Yes, Why? Do you know of any company providing such Consulting Service?
Your opinion would be highly valuable to me. I am eagerly waiting to hear from you.
Thanks,
Sujay
Yes, Sujay many companies can take advantage of these kind of services and providing them could present a very interesting and lucrative opportunity. As a matter of fact many companies are already in this business and offer large portfolio of services related to managing the full cycle of outsourcing (not necessarily only offshore) engagements.
5 Rules of Luck with your Potluck
The month of October is almost over and I have not written a single post. Well, I do need a day job and it’s been incredibly demanding over past few months. A number of projects that kept roughly 50 people working over a half a year are in the finishing stage. Multiple systems that have been developed over that period have to integrate and start talking to each other in production in just a few days. No surprise it keeps me away from blogging, yet I’ve committed to at least one post a month and there is no way around it. By the way, talking about distributed projects, why are they so… insane?
Have you ever tried to setup a potluck with say 10-15 families? Everyone needs to come in at approximately the same time, bring the food they committed to making, warm it up, set up table, and party on. Pretty simple task isn’t it? So let’s throw in some complications, typical in IT world. The families have to fly in from different parts of the world. Some of the families never met each other. Some of them do not like each other. Some speak different languages. You have disagreements on menu, confused about dietary restrictions, and the place of meeting is in flux. Your – the organizer – have to deal with your own waterfall of issues – mortgage refi, kids school troubles, broken plumbing, in-laws arriving unexpectedly, less than encouraging results from the last physical, and a recent escalation of tension with your boss… And there are only a couple days to the party. OK. Now I think we have a good metaphor for what my team have to accomplish.
As a matter of fact that is a good metaphor for many complex SI projects I’ve been through. Are there any recipes for avoiding a disaster? Any medicines to take? Well, there is no panacea or silver bullet. Maybe just a few basic guidelines:
- ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth, and half-a-dozen gentlemen aboard one ship are as bad as two kings of Brentford.’ [1855 C. Kingsley Westward Ho! II. vii.] There are more quotes and proverbs stating the same point that I can possible number. And the guidance in this case is very simple; it was clearly stated in ’86 movie Highlander – “There can be only one”. There can be only one head of the engagement with authority across all troops involved.
- Collaborate or die. That’s almost a truism when it comes to distributed engagements. Yet, I am still looking for a team, an engagement, or at least a project on which all stakeholders agree that they have no communication issues and nothing can be possibly improved. So do you best and of course when it comes to communicating use common standards, common language, common tools – or should I just say “Remember the Babylon!” ;)
- Eliminate the waste. When it comes to final stages of engagement the troops are tired, the deadlines are tighter, pressures are higher, and inevitably, the team’s ability to employ common sense deteriorates. I have seen unnecessary testing cycles, stupid mistakes, round about ways to address the issues, “group grope” meetings and other wasteful activities proliferate at astounding rate as engagements get closer to the end. A JavaScript error triggers call to a DBA who engages in hours of troubleshooting at database level. Configuration change pushes QA Manager to request a full round of regression testing. A tag naming discussion turns into 2 hr long all-hands. And so on. Stay on look out and eliminate the waste with the vengeance.
- Don’t change horses in midstream. Adjusting your methodology, changing processes and procedures are better left to discussion on full stomach, when all the potluck meals have been served and consumed. Implementing even most brilliant SDLC improvements does not belong to the final stage of engagement.
- Watch the clock. I am not talking about counting the minutes left till the launch press conference, no, I am talking about hours your best performers put on the project. There are limits to what even the strongest members can continuously put in without deterioration in productivity. A minor mistake by a release manager who has been working 70 hrs a week for past two months will throw you back completely destroying the gains built to date by all that overtime.
Boy, I’m looking at the list above and I see that we broke all these rules… no wonder the only time I have to write this post is 4 AM ;(
PO Trip Adviser: India
Continuing with a line of travel guides I turn to the most common outsourcing destination – India. There are a plenty of outstanding travel guides for India, so if you are planning to combine business and pleasure, and see places such as the Agra, Rajasthan, and Kerala make sure you study them before you depart. Keep in mind though that most of the most interesting places will take dedicated and possibly considerable time, for example while Taj Mahal is fairly close to Delhi / Noida the trip there is going to take you at least a day.
For those of us who are limited to strictly business, here are a few tips to consider:
- A Visa is easy to get, but it may take a few weeks so allocate sufficient time.
- Safety of travel in India is not what it used to be just a few years ago, yet large outsourcing cities remain quite safe for majority of business travelers.
- Shop around for tickets and ask frequent India travelers for advice. Chances are you can find something 30% less than standard internet rates using Indian travel consolidators.
- Chances are you will arrive in India around midnight. I typically go straight to a hotel right near the airport and start my business day the next morning.
- Stay in nice hotels, 4-5 stars. They are relatively affordable and the high quality service will help you to retain the energy you most certainly need.
- Ask the vendor to arrange all your travel and have a car with a chauffer. Don’t even think about driving in India. The traffic and road system is not for the faint of heart plus they drive on the wrong side of the road!
- Petty corruption is widespread in India, from expediting you through airport customs to dealing with government agencies and employees can involve bribing or “tipping” as it is often referred to. My advice it to stay away from it.
- Make sure you have your personal belongings partitioned among suite cases and carry on. Lost luggage is a fairly common event. Use solid suitcases as mishandling is also common at airports.
- Don’t wander off the beaten track, don’t encourage beggars, don’t visit shady places, don’t leave your valuables unattended, don’t put your wallet in your back pocket, use licensed guides in sightseeing – basically use common sense!
- Eat only in good restaurants or at your hotel. Avoid eating buffet meals, even in high-end places. Not only drink bottled water, but also brush your teeth with it.
PO Trip Adviser: Russia
While working on a outsourcing destinations chapter for my book I realized that tips for travel in many countries could be helpful to those not accustomed to traveling to third world countries and other outsourcing destinations. Of course there are plenty of books, websites and forums covering travel to any place in the world. I am not planning on competing with them in any way, my goal is create a simple list of items to keep in mind when visiting a vendor far away from your home becomes necessary. I am planning to put a couple posts covering few countries that I have a fortune to spend time in and let me start with the one that I lived in for 30 years…
So, here we go – a few tips on traveling to Russia – one of the top Eastern European outsourcing destinations:
- Visas are required and getting one can be a tricky process. Make sure you allocate at least one month for processing the paperwork.
- Unfortunately terrorism and street crime are a part of daily lives in many parts of the Russia. Still, on a relative scale, Russia, and especially the tier-one cities, are safe and great places to visit.
- Shop around for tickets. If you know any Russians who stay connected to their motherland, ask them for help. There are many Russian travel agencies that can find great deals on tickets.
- Staying in nice hotels can be price prohibitive, particularly in tier-one cities. Ask your vendor for help with travel arrangements.
- You can rent a car and drive in Russia. Be prepared for a manual stick shift and very aggressive driving styles. You may face very serious traffic and won’t see any signs in English, so finding your way can be a challenge.
- Ask your vendor to arrange sightseeing for you. Due to large distances and complexities in city navigation, you would be much better off on a guided tour. And I assure you Russian cities and their suburbs have a lot to offer a curious visitor such as architecture, landscape and even shopping.
- Ask your vendor for recommendation when it comes to restaurants. Nowadays, especially the big cities, offer a great variety of styles and cuisines but the cost can be astronomical. Just like many other destinations, not only drink bottled water but also brush your teeth with it.
- Prices are generally quoted in rubles. Currency can be freely converted at banks, hotels or kiosks specifically for tourists.
If you have any suggestions, ideas or tips on travel to Russia please comment or email me, I’ll be happy to update the list.
Hidden Meaning of Common Phrases
A while ago I started covering multiple aspects of negotiations as they relate to offshore outsourcing. The topic of negotiations is broad and multi-dimensional. Some of the aspects of negotiations are applicable to communications at large, to the areas where regular conversations and negotiations blend in creating just a regular business communications. In that light I’d like to touch upon a very important subject – uncovering hidden meaning of conversations.
Business traditions, common aspects of professional communications and society rituals as well as personal preferences and needs change straightforward communications to slightly encrypted information flow that if not appropriately deciphered could become misleading, deceiving and confusing. Consider a very simple example: You present a system design to java architect who reports to you and after you presentation he says – “I like your system design but IMHO it lacks integrity.” What did he just say? Well, you probably know how to translate this sentence – “Your design sucks and if you were not my boss I would fire you on a spot”.
When working for decent company as a part of trustworthy solid team verbal maces of politics give way to WISIWIG communication style. Even though we still sugarcoat bad news and follow professional standards of communications there is not much hiding of true meaning in our conversations. The situation is quite different when it comes to sales process and negotiations between not too close partners. That’s why you need to study a few techniques that give you the insider look into hidden meanings of conversations.
Five levels of customer satisfaction
A few days ago Sathya, an onsite offshore coordinator aka account manager working with my company, stopped by to discuss what he and his company could do to earn my trust and to make me happy. I wish more people in my life would ask the same questions, in particular women. And I tell you, in many cases the answers would be exceptionally simple. Well, not when it comes to making me happy as a CTO managing multimillion dollar technology budget. In this case earning my trust and keeping me happy is a very tall order. I am sure that many of you are dealing with the same question (either asking or answering it), so I think there is a value in sharing what I told Sathya…
There are at least 5 levels / horizons of customer satisfaction that the vendor has to achieve. There is a natural order to these horizons and there is no reason even to approach fifth level till you are done with the first one. And of course reaching just one horizon doesn’t give you much. You need to maintain all five in perfect state to achieve that illusive customer sat…
The first horizon is the company / corporation itself. The company engaged you as the vendor in order to achieve certain objectives. The company has specific metrics it wants you to comply with – financial, quality, productivity, etc. Before your go any further you need to meet the expectations established by these metrics. In case the company did not establish the metrics you should do it yourself and bring them to the company. Show us, the corporation, that you are contributing to the overall success of the company, helping us with the bottom line, delivering to the benchmarks of quality that are same or better than internal personnel, meeting deadlines and staying under budget. Even though that appears a difficult horizon to reach, it is actually the simplest one. Catering to the organization is a high level task, it allows you to be generally correct, meet expectations in most cases, etc. you do not have to be always perfect. Some failures and individual mishaps do not appear on executive radars and could be averaged out by successful projects and other money saving initiates. Read more »
How to say Thank You in your provider’s language?
Thank you, спасибо, gracias, dziękuję, спасибі, धन्यवाद, آپ کا شکریہ, obrigado, 谢谢… How do you say it? Do you even need to say it? What if you want to say more?
In general, motivation of your offshore team should not be your responsibility. Your vendor should make sure that the team members are jazzed up with working for you. As a matter of fact washing hands off the HR headaches is one of the reasons many company consider outsourcing. Yet when you find yourself working through thick and thin with resources based in some third world country the ability to influence their morale and productivity becomes very import. Of course there are plenty of ways you can influence third party resources that fall in the “stick” category, and what about the “carrot”?
Dealing with both the carrot and the stick I look at relationships with third parties at three levels – corporate, team, and individual. Unsurprisingly, each level requires a different methodology; an approach that you use to award an individual team member varies drastically from recognizing the corporation. Motivation at each can make its contribution to overall impact on your initiative. Sometimes you need all three and sometimes you are most effective when using just one. You could be using a stick at one level and carrot at another. There are a plenty of combinations, 27 to be precise :)
10 Rules for your First Outsourcing Project
Last week I had a chance to connect with an old friend of mine – a serial entrepreneur, a pioneer of electronic commerce and outsourcing survivor. His first outsourcing initiative turned out a complete disaster and almost cost him the company. The human memory works in very peculiar way – we look back through pink spectacles – most of the negative events of the past do not seem nearly as painful as they felt at the moment. Yet John did not have any sentimental memories about his outsourcing attempt or anything good to say about the experience his team went through. He, as most successful business people, doesn’t blame someone for it, learned from it, and I am certain that if he ever goes through another outsourcing deal it won’t be anything close to the ordeal he went through. That’s if he ever tries outsourcing again…
So, what do you need to do to make sure that your first outsourcing project doesn’t become the last one?
1. Do your homework. You wouldn’t attempt to fly airplane without learning how to do it first? Outsourcing is a very sophisticated tool and using it without understanding is certain to backfire.
2. Start small. Was your first driving experience a trip around the country? Most likely not. Consider it when picking your first project.
3. Minimize risks. I do not mean to state blindly obvious. What I mean is that outsourcing is a risk by itself, so minimize every risk that you can. Learn about risks and cons of outsourcing and eliminate as much as you can. For example time difference introduces a high risk – so go with a nearshore vendor to eliminate it.
Be careful what you ask for
Too much of a good thing?
A few days ago I had to make a couple flight reservations. I had two canceled trips credits, one on United and one on American, that could be applied to the oncoming trips. Unfortunately, I could not do it online and had to navigate through the phone menus to get to customer service reps. BTW, I don’t like that voice recognition software, it often chocks on my accent and it takes me much longer to go through it than traditional “press zero to talk to a representative”. Anyway, I got to talk to the reps. With United the reps’ name was Chris what is probably, judging by the background call center noise and strong Indian accent, was short for Krishnamurthy. For American the reps’ name was Linda who judging by her southern drawl and jokes she cracked was very much local.
Chris was exquisitely polite calling me Dear Mr. Krym, asking for my permission to put me on hold, thanking me profusely for staying on hold while he was doing some research (most likely asking for permission for every tiny change I needed to make to my itinerary). Linda cut to the chase and while cordial was not particularly overwhelming. Anyway, less than an hour later I had both of my trips setup. There was a slight difference though. The transaction on American took roughly 5 minutes. Ticket change on United took about 45 minutes, and when I received confirmation I discovered that instead of returning on Wed night I was set for Tue morning and instead of non-stop I was on a ridiculous route with two hour layover. Read more »
Of Frogs and Wrestlers
So you found a new vendor, negotiated a perfect deal and established relationships with key players. The team starts its work and shortly you can realize the savings you’ve been looking for. A year passes faster than you could ever imagine. Reports coming from the vendor showing good compliance with the benchmarks you established. You about to give yourself a pat on the back for being such an incredible offshore manager. And just to be a good sport you take a few business users for a dinner to share with them the wonderful achievements of incredible you.
Unfortunately even before you are done with the first round of drinks the conversation takes a rather unpleasant turn. No, they are not happy with both the quality of work your offshore team has been providing and their productivity. They are afraid of changes to be done to the systems your offshore team supports, they do not submit bugs because they are afraid that fixing one new bug would re-open a dozen of old ones; they do not enter RFEs because they do not believe they would ever be delivered, and so on.
What just has happened? All that rain on your parade is coming from a completely left field. Read more »
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:
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
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.
Herding Cats
You most likely have seen that commercial.
I think EDS has a great point here, managing software organizations is very much like herding cats. Managing software teams with outsourced distributed components take herding cats to a profoundly higher level – doing it on steroids… or should I say on drugs?
How can one survive the ordeal of getting a product out in multi-sourced distributed environment? Language barriers alone brought the Babel project to its fiasco. And you know that language barrier is often much easier to deal with than with communication barriers or cultural differences.
Well, it’s been done, as a matter of fact many times… on time, within budget and over-delivering on customer’s expectations. Is there a recipe I can offer? Probably not, at least not a panacea that will fit any project or organization. As a matter of fact specific combination of project / team / environment demands its own methodology, approach, techniques. Let me offer just one of those, five C’s of distributed project delivery:
- Casting. That is the first and the most important element – select right tools for the job, find the right providers for the task, put people in positions that match their skills and aspirations.
- Compensation. Make sure that resources on your project are properly compensated for what they do, that applies to everyone from your in-house architects to offshore worker-bees. Considering that working with offshore throws a huge monkey wrench in your ability to control compensation you may need to start early – when establishing your relationships with providers.
- Communications. Put a well thought out communication plan in work and enforce it with the vengeance, at the same time review it and improve with every opportunity. Make sure that you cover all channels and take advantage of multiple media.
- Culture. Cultural differences derailed many projects and engagements. At the same time it is not necessarily as difficult or complex of an issue. Here are just a few things consider – acknowledge / recognize cultural difference, educate the team about them, and keep attention on cultural aspects, in particular when it comes to communications, estimating and delivery patterns.
- Control. Control execution on an ongoing basis in every aspect of the project – schedule, budget, quality. That is a large topic partially covered in the blog already (see for example Peace in Metrics). I will talk more about it in future posts.
Offshore Account Manager
A few days ago an interesting question came over email –
Hi Nick,
Thank you for your valuable inputs and keep them coming as usual at your blog..I have been reading your blogs for sometime now and I enjoy reading them as the info provided are very helpful for me.I have recently taken a new role into account management. My task is to define the scope of account management.
Though I have some specific areas in mind; acct governance, acct communications, acct performance & reporting.. do you have any advise on what should be also included? Might you know if there are any interesting online account management portals/association i can get into?
Your advise will greatly help.
Thanks,
AH
Singapore
Account Manager is somewhat ambiguous position with often very unclear job description. Well, when it comes to job descriptions many companies stay at very high level not providing employees sufficient understanding of the expectations and expecting employees to fill in the blanks. That’s in particular common in management positions (take a look at my post Manager, the Job Description).
As a matter of fact Account Manager (AM) is an exceptionally important role, especially in the Offshore Outsourcing world. There are several definitions / understandings of the role, ranging from “a sales person dedicated to existing accounts” to “a customer advocate”. I think it’s not one or another, it’s the entire spectrum and in that light AM responsibilities include many dimensions, the list below includes the most important three.
Peace in Metrics
Agile techniques and approaches are marching across the software land conquering more and more territories. It was not a blitzkrieg forefathers of agile has dreamed of but it is a successful invasion. Along with true agile aficionados with their well thought out and understood processes the crowds of software anarchists disguised as agile evangelists are capturing organizations by storm. Picking selected items from the agile menu they bask in glory of self-respect enjoying coding / refactoring dance leaving aside schedules, deliverables, and milestones. While religiously following 40-hour work weeks and iteration retrospectives they enjoy weeping sounds of deadlines as they fly by.
While agile made a huge positive impact on software development as any other broad initiative it created some serious problems and could not avoid significant collateral damage. One of the first victims to the new brave world were the software metrics. Indeed, why do you need metrics in a self-monitoring organization with a clear measure of success – the working product? Even Tom DeMarco backed off from some of his ideas, why should not you? … And maybe that’s why it took agile community such a long time to figure out that test-driven development is ridiculously expensive…
Combining agile and offshore is not at all impossible. It is however complex and requires a plenty of prerequisites, including serious agile maturity of the on-shore team. You should think twice before eliminating “overhead” of the waterfall on your offshore projects. And specifically, forgoing the metrics can be detrimental / border line juvenile delinquency.
Of course the topic metrics is also complex and rather controversial. What to measure? How to measure? What to do with the results? Here are a few tips to consider:
Offshore and Code Review
Code review is a rather controversial subject. On one hand many SDLC gurus, tech leads, and architects agree that it could present an incredible value, on the other hand it’s one of the last quality procedures to be exercised in a majority of organizations. There are many reasons code review often takes the back seat, one of the most important ones is morale impact of code review. If let unmanaged code reviews can often cause tension in the team, things quickly become personal and instead of improving quality of code generate turmoil and finger pointing. Another reason of code reviews’ lack of popularity is their complexity in process sense, in particular timing.
I am in general a big proponent of code reviews and when it comes to offshore I found those irreplaceable. Specific implementation of code review depends largely on SDLC and outsourcing model used by the team.
If you fully outsourced your SDLC to an offshore partner you in a large degree will be at mercy of their internal SDLC. If you have an ability to influence your vendor’s processes you may want to request code review as a mandatory step and hope that it will be performed according to the best practices that are generally well known nowadays.
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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.
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Trip to blogosphere
Outsourcing is a very broad topic with plenty of controversial topics, inevitably there plenty of people who have something to say about it. Chances are if you are interested in this subject you run across articles and posts by Outsourcing Institute or Horses for Sources. A couple years ago I put a few references in my blogroll and started a blogosphere directory. Thanks to the law of reciprocity that generated a few back-links and traffic to my blog. Over time the blogroll become stale pointing the blogs that become dormant or completely disappeared. I did not notice it till just recently, as I was doing some cleanup of the blog.
Similar to my freelancing directory the blog roll needed to be refreshed. In addition to cleaning it up I decided to create an outsourcing blog “directory” as well. And with no hesitation I went on blog hunting with a help of my fearless VA Yesha, looking for blogs that cover outsourcing. Very soon we had a list with more than 100 entries, unfortunately, many of them covered topics that I am not too familiar with and/or not too interested in such as Law Process Outsourcing or blogs solely focused on BPO. So we went back pruning the list getting it to less than 50 entries. Some of the blogs that got the ax were fairly active in outsourcing blogosphere, and I may include rejected entries in the list later on after I get a chance to check a few posts and see whether they are worth considering. Of course what’s one man trash is another man’s treasure, so “worth considering” is a very subjective term. Plus in any blog the posts are typically hit-or-miss, and even loosely related sources can put some interesting article once in a while. Well, I cannot create full directory, even with help of a couple dozen of Vas, that’s why we have omnipotent Google.
Anyway, please see the list sorted by URL of the blog on this page. To make the list a bit more helpful I added PR and Alexa ratings in the same manner as in my freelancing marketplace directory and created two additional versions of the list, one sorted Alexa Global and another by Alexa US. As usual, feel free to comment and suggest new entries. I am planning to update the list in ~12 months from now.
November 2, 2011 Posted by Nick Krym | Managing Offshore Engagements, News, Articles, Thoughts and Comments | Offshore Tips, Outsourcing | Leave a Comment