Client Communication with Outsourcers Enhanced by Web 2.0

Outsourced software development firms communicating with their clients using current Web-enabled methods of collaboration find best results; here are some best practices to keep in mind


By all accounts, outsourcing is very "in" these days. Peter Fingar, author of the book Extreme Competition, claims it's the only way for businesses to survive and compete in today's global economy.

To begin with: Is it "outsourcing" or "offshoring"? Forrester senior analyst Dave West defines offshoring as crossing geopolitical barriers to hire a third party to do work for you. He noted that "outsourcing" doesn't necessarily imply a foreign country. Whichever term you prefer, the objective is to leverage lower human capital costs and/or a larger talent supply. Today, virtually any type of work is outsourced: manufacturing, support, development, testing, training, and even legal work. In the software world, the buzz continues for business process outsourcing (BPO) and all types of application hosting and customer support.

Out of the Question

Danny Briere, CEO of marketing software provider mBlast (www.mblast.com), says, "Back in 2000, we lost seven months and $1 million1 trying to work with an outsource company that had its project management and developers based in the U.S. There was so much non-coding overhead, and the path they were going on would have cost us a fortune in time and money to get the product to market."

Briere continues, "We abandoned that work and had to start from scratch. However, despite this painful experience, we still needed to find engineering resources that were competitively priced and could help us develop and maintain our system efficiently. Now we use 85 developers in Pakistan, India, and Ukraine and have management in each area that reports directly to our CTO in the U.S. We've been able to drop our cost of programming by 90 percent or more. This allows us to plan the launch of a new product this fall that would have likely cost three or four times more had we not used an outsourcing model."

Pioneering Outrage and Outlay

While larger organizations were already using offshore resources back in 2000 to provide customer support and application maintenance, Briere and a handful of other brave leaders saw offshoring as a means to cheaply develop new applications. In hindsight, the industry's processes were not yet mature enough to handle the inherent complexities and interdependencies of people, culture, code, and technology.

Most early offshore software development used India-based resources that were plentiful and significantly cheaper than their U.S. counterparts. Despite the well-educated, English-trained talent, the thick, "foreign" accents, and time zone differences made communication between Indian developers and U.S. clients quite difficult.

The relationships also faced significant process challenges. Both sides suffered from a lack of discipline that neglected the architectural planning required when building and scaling any type of software.

Culturally, everything from mismatched holiday schedules to mismatched expectations regarding accountability and process control led to seemingly irreconcilable problems. Projects were too far along by the time problems were found, and corrections were costly and sometimes not even possible, as in the case of mBlast.


source : http://www.softwaremag.com/L.cfm?Doc=1256-3/2010


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