I just added a new post to my new blog Common Sense Management – Laws of Nature and the Need for Management. It touches upon one of my favorite metaphors – application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to management and offshore outsourcing (see also Fundamental Laws of Outsourcing). The message common to these posts is quite simple – you must stay on a top of your projects, resources and engagements otherwise they would quickly deteriorate.

Having said that I have to admit I should pay more attention to what I preach and follow my own recommendations. Just a few days ago I was going through a small project that seemed to be falling behind. The issues became clear in a few minutes after I walked in the meeting discussing the project status.

The objectives for the project I stated about two months ago were lost and the void was filled in by something substantially more complex (And that illustrates another law – “nature abhors a vacuum”). My offshore team was happy to work on more challenging projects, estimates appeared too high, that required in-depth analysis, more people were getting involved, more issues discovered, that generated substantial amount of R&D that increased the complexity by an order of magnitude… Involved in the meeting there were six people from onsite and almost as many from offshore.

For me, at this point an unattached side observer, it was obvious that the efforts being extended to address the project exceeded the value of it by a great margin. It was not at all clear to people so passionately involved in resolving the problem.

About an hour later it was all over. The vicious circle was broken as the proverbial Gordian Knot. The projects objectives were not only restated but addressed. It required 15 minutes from an engineer who had not been even aware of the discussion. Yet the sunk cost of the project was unrecoverable, exceptionally high and not justifiable by any means. Is there anyone to blame for it except the manager (me) who abdicated the project to those who did not have enough technical depth to cut through the distractions of secondary objectives?

I started my earlier post Five Steps to Keeping your Business with comparison of an offshoring engagement to a bad marriage: courting, expensive wedding, honeymoon, initial struggles, mundane irritation, aggravated frustration, and bitter divorce. The post touched upon the most important steps vendors should take to keep their business. Now let me cover the buyer’s side. And first let’s discuss a couple reasons for keeping your vendors. Of course if a vendor fails your expectations by a large margin there are not too many reasons for keeping that vendor, if any. If the vendor is perfect the thought of changing them is rather unlikely. (Please do let me know what your vendor is in this case, so far I fail to find one!) The question is relevant to vendors that in general deliver on expectations and sometimes exceed them and yet are in many ways imperfect, sometimes even worse than that. To some degree these reasons for keeping the vendor summarize to “Don’t fix if it’s not broken” – Continue reading →

In my earlier post Notes from a Data Entry Gig I covered a few areas related to a small data entry project. There were several areas that were left untouched, one of them – execution control, is worth covering by itself.

There are many things you can do to get execution under control on medium to large scope engagements. Project/program management, account reviews, etc. That’s not the methodology to be used on a small gig such as limited scope web research, data entry, SEO, etc.

Considering that discipline and control issues associated with freelancing have to do with a lot of its Cons I was rather skeptical farming out data entry to a few gals in several small cities in Philippines. One would say “it’s a small data entry, what can go wrong”, yet you and I know the possibilities to screw it up are endless. “And then I saw the tool, Now I am a believer.” [almost from Neil Diamond]  Continue reading →