ResourcePad Blog

According to Silicon.com, because outsourcing is experiencing a general slump in the US, Europe should be the key destination for those in the offshore outsourcing market. Indeed, to that extent, many vendors I know have begun to shift their focus to Australia, Germany and the like where until a few months ago, their key demo was the American market. Just goes to show how quickly things change in the IT business.

Another thing that’s worrying is the increasing reports of a global slowdown in outsourcing - TPI states that there’s been a 17% reduction in projects which is the largest decrease since 2001 in the first three quarters of the financial year. However, although the average contract value of outsourced projects in the US were down 38% to about $179 million, Europe showed an equal (35%) increase in their average totaling $277 million, which is approximated $100 million more than the US. While Europe only had a global (outsourcing) market share of about 37% last year, they’re now dominating with a 56% stake in the pie.

So if you’re a vendor, turn your eyes towards Europe and prepare to up your ante especially if you’re from South Asia competing with winners like Romania, Bulgaria, etc.

You can read the full article here.

AT Kearney, the independent research firm recently brought up a study conducted with 50 companies who outsource their business or IT processes offshore to get a better idea of what works for them. Needless to say, the study uncovered some interesting things including the fact that, to quote the report, ‘revenue performance improvement might be offshoring’s diamond in the rough’. Which means what, exactly? It means offshore outsourcing not only helps companies with their own workload and implementation of services they either don’t have the expertise to do themselves, or because of budgeting constraints; it also helps in profit margins. Outsourcing is actually pushing up revenues for corporations according to the study.

This may be the best news the offshore outsourcing industry has heard in months, especially with news of some companies stating that it’s over hyped and overused.

ResourcePad’s got it covered of course, under an excellent article written by new contributer Tom Kricheck. You can view it here.

Recently I came across a set of questions promoting cultural differences across the offshore platform, and though these issues are real and they do exist and they can cause quite a bit of problems for SMEs especially those who can’t waste important cash to start training programs; there’s a lot to be said for the basic rule: communication, and lots of it.

There have been a lot of new articles springing up on ResourcePad.com which I would advise you all to read, because not only are they informative and helpful, but they’re coming from people much like ourselves who’ve either started their own companies, have been working for other SMEs or who’ve been in the outsourcing development area for a couple of years.

We’re still working on our miniature Flash promo and hope to hear your comments on it once it’s been uploaded.

Cheers,

Alex

Some of you may have noticed an apparent lack of blog posts - our prior set of posts have been deleted, and moved to the appropriate sections on the eXchange. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and the dead links you may be being directed to. However, that said, we’d like to invite you to take a look at our recently completed and constantly updated site, here.

Another thing we’ve been working on is a Flash animation adequately describing our goals on the eXchange. Something along the lines of a communication and thought process stream between buyer and seller - client and vendor. It deals with miscommunication, touches on the the depth of the market we’re aiming to breach, and injects a little humor into the situation of how we’re all so misunderstood. We should have that ready and incorporated into our look, soon.

Meanwhile, you can take a look at what we’ve already got, with a set of varying people sharing their experiences and knowledge. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts on any stories, articles or Q & As presented.

There’s been a lot of talk about Green Sourcing recently, and now it turns out, it’s all been a whitewash of sorts. Silicon.com has been reporting that green sourcing is considered a primary prerequisite for hiring outsourcing and off shore companies citing a report by Brown-Wilson. Most especially, data centers with their hordes of PCs sending poisonous vapors out there, have been a primary cause for concern.

However, more than one person from within the ‘go green’ camp has begun to join its naysayers. And though they have a point – after all, despite the solar powered electricity grid some companies are now sporting – the point remains: the more clients, the more resources, the more resources the more power consumed. So far it seems, no one has really been able to find an adequate workaround around the problem.

ZDNet’s reporting that companies seem to having withdrawal symptoms from using too much green and have begun to see the flaws with various firms trying to cash in. Looking back on it, a lot of it does seem to a marketing mess – especially since it’s become a consideration with larger companies when outsourcing to smaller ones – how much are you spending on the green stuff? The answer to it seems so significant, that one wrong step, could take you to the wrong side of town.

Some people seem to think that it might be over toppling the need for good service – after all, if Company A’s got the green sources so very important to the environment – they mayn’t be focusing as much attention on what counts, and going with the group might lead to corporate failure. Yours, that is.

But then, there’s the much talked about ‘global warming’ issue that seems to be spilling over into every conversation, IT related or not.

It seems however, despite Silicon.com’s very informative report, that software service providers are not high on the list of people who should go green. And if you think about it, that’s where the real problem lies, so to speak. I’m not an environmentalist or anything, but I do believe that shutting off PCs on a daily basis will be a reduction in…some capacity.

So what do you think of green sourcing? Do you think it will ever find as expansive a home as it seems to have found in the rest of the corporate world, where it’s almost a business?

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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Almost on all freelance/offshoring web portals, there are hundreds of providers and buyers have to sort through them and their bids. In order to make it easier for buyers to choose a provider, different portals provide different schemes to rank providers. So how should different providers be ranked? Following are some of the parameters:

1. Provider’s earning - the more the earning, the more successful a provider is. But does that mean he/she’d be good for a particular project?
2. Provider’s feedback from other buyers - the better the feedback the better the provider. However, usually feedbacks are played up. For example, a lot of people on elance.com get a 5/5, and Elance defines 5 as “exceeded expectations”. It’s hard to believe that so many people exceed expectations and the quality is still poor - either there is something wrong with the expectations or the rankings are hyped up!
3. Number of feedbacks in a given period of time - this is also not a real representative as a lot of providers deal with same buyers and ask them to give dummy feedbacks.
4. Certifications - some sites like rentacoder.com have certification tests, so different providers can take those tests and be a certified provider, however, a successful project takes more than simple certifications i.e., management, risk planning, communication etc.

These are some of the parameters used by various portals, but what about direct contacts. That usually depends on the charisma of the sales person. So how can we rank providers in an accurate, honest and fair way? I think I should invite some of our readers to comment on that.

As our readers can see from the blog, we’ve had quite a bit of activity here lately. We’ve been working hard to add in more features. You must have noticed that we recently added the polls functionality to get feedback on the various issues that we come across. Today we’ve added the following features:

Post rating option: You can now rate individual posts. This has been done so that we can see what our users think about these even if they don’t want to comment. This will help us improve the quality of content and provide more value to our users.

Newsletter: Now you can subscribe to our newsletter which will have all the latest updates on the site as well as the up coming features. We are opening up a restricted alpha version of the site next week, so if you want to sign up to sneak preview the features, please sign up for the newsletter. We’ll be sending you logins/passwords later next week.

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

(No Ratings Yet)

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As long as owners are involved in the project everything goes well, as soon as the project is handed over to a project manager or a team lead, there are problems all over the place starting from communication to plain careless mistakes. A lot of bootstrap startups have this problem, especially in India and Paksitan. Why don’t employees take as much ownership as the owners? How can they be made to take ownership?

One of my friends, who has an offshore development center in Bangalore, was in England last month. For one of the projects he asked his project managers if everything is well and if things are done as per the client’s specifications. He was told that everything was fine and that the client is happy. So he scheduled a meeting with the client and also gave him an invoice for the work done. Not only this, he mentioned this client as a reference to his new clients in England. It turned out that the client was not happy at all, and that there were lots of bugs in the application and the programmers have been working for days but they haven’t been able to fix much. This was a total disaster primarily because he had already given the reference of this client to his other new customers. The reason for this mess up was not that programming was messed up, but rather the fact that he was kept in dark about the original situation of the project. This is because the team never took the ownership of the project.

One of the main reasons a team may not take ownership is because the team usually doesn’t know what depends on the project. They usually don’t have the big picture of a particular client and a particular project. A project may be a pilot project to be followed by a lot of other projects. Also it may be so that the client is very influential and it’s good to keep him happy. These things are quite difficult to explain to a team lead or a project manager. An easier approach would be to ensure that someone is ultimately responsible for a project no matter what happens. This is so that no blame can be shifted and someone knows who’s responsible for the entire project. For example, a project manager should be responsible for everything in the project: from specifications to quality assurance, maintaining scope and making sure that the project doesn’t exceed budget. In most cases, people need just one person to take owners, rest of the people will take ownership themselves. Also for any top level manager, the main idea is to ensure that projects are completed in timely manner with reasonable quality. To ensure this, someone has bear all responsibility for the success as well as the failure.

Hello everyone!

ResourcePad is a platform for professionals, firms and freelancers to exchange ideas, stories and experiences about technology contracting and outsourcing. Our aim is to bring together professionals from diverse backgrounds and combine their experiences so that the community as a whole can benefit. We’ve been able to sign-up quite a few industry veterans who would be sharing their experiences on this blog frequently.

The topics will range from offshoring, outsourcing, near-sourcing, software engineering, project management, technologies (ruby on rails, php, java, asp.net) to articles on how to do a thing efficiently, comments on articles elsewhere on the web. We would be discussing questions such as:

a. Why do offshore providers mostly produce poor quality of work? Why do most people think that outsourcing means poor quality of work?

b. If so many jobs are lost to offshoring, why are Google and Microsoft campaigning for increasing H1-B visa limits?

c. Why is Germany behind US and UK in offshoring?

d. Why is China behind India in offshoring?

e. How can local consultants survive this offshoring trend?

f. What are the best practices when outsourcing a project?

etc. etc.

We aim to make this an exciting platform and we are currently building exciting tools (the first one to be released on 1st September) to help the community even further.

Let’s help each other out…!