Successful Offshoring?
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I've got a client who is considering outsourcing his web development overseas. There's of course no shortage of horror stories online about offshored projects.... Anyone have any success stories to counterbalance that?
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yes. Company I used to work for had a successful group in Romania. BUT it worked only because we had several native Romanians working in our office who served as not only project leads and managers but also as liaison with the remote team.
Effectively we offshored the bulk of the work but did all the integration and business logic work (the hard stuff) at our own offices.That combination worked, getting the application out the door on time and on budget, albeit with only (literally) minutes to spare when the web service stack it needed to communicate with crashed on the morning of the day it was supposed to be demoed in the afternoon to customers (which was no fault of either the local or remote team, they did however discover that their system didn't handle that particular error scenario gracefully).
But that doesn't offset the general bad taste in my mouth I've gotten with almost every other offshoring project I've ever been (directly or indirectly) involved with.
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No.
We get low-quality unmaintainable spaghetti code, that sometimes looks like it's been convolved with malicious intent.
For example, Implementing WHERE id = @something in ASP is just a tip of the iceberg.
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at least you got something...
I've been involved in 2 projects where we never got anything at all, except a lawsuit for not paying for delivery of non-delivered goods.
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@jwenting said:
it worked only because we had several native Romanians working in our office who served as not only project leads and managers but also as liaison with the remote team.
We have a similar arrangement except replace Romania with India, but I think that part of the success lies with what technology is being used. Most things go pretty well, but something "uncommon" like C is quite difficult to get nailed down.
IMO, rather than say "no, we don't develop in technology X" and lose business, the companies will accept any job and learn on-the-fly and the results speak for themselves.
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@DoctorFriday said:
@jwenting said:
it worked only because we had several native Romanians working in our office who served as not only project leads and managers but also as liaison with the remote team.
We have a similar arrangement except replace Romania with India, but I think that part of the success lies with what technology is being used. Most things go pretty well, but something "uncommon" like C is quite difficult to get nailed down.
IMO, rather than say "no, we don't develop in technology X" and lose business, the companies will accept any job and learn on-the-fly and the results speak for themselves.
Quite likely, which in no small part explains the terribly high number of (mainly) Indian kids scouring the web for quick hacks and ways to cheat at certification exams.
That's less of a problem in eastern Europe where shops mostly specialise in specific technologies and will not take on projects that fall outside of their area of expertise.
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yes, only to have it outsourced back to some form of western civilization:
http://forums.sun.com/index.jspa
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There are many success stories of outsourcing offshore, that’s why big companies are increasingly outsourcing their business functions to low cost providers. Advantages are for both, if both companies fairly work with each other and respect each other’s policies, there is nothing left for making outsourcing a success.
KhurramModerator's note: advertising removed
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@Khurram said:
if both companies fairly work with each other and respect each other’s policies, there is nothing left for making outsourcing a success.
You are so full of shit.Both sides can respect each other's policies and still create a crap product, in which case it would not be a success.
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A casual observation of the human condition (viewed from both a cultural and biological perspective), has me pondering whether God offshored His work. He had a very tight Deadline, of course, and being Self-employed, He might have looked upon offshoring as a viable way of increasing production capacity -- but the results really speak for themselves.
Good/cheap/fast -- I think we all know which two He chose!
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@dhromed said:
A casual observation of the human condition (viewed from both a cultural and biological perspective), has me pondering whether God offshored His work. He had a very tight Deadline, of course, and being Self-employed, He might have looked upon offshoring as a viable way of increasing production capacity -- but the results really speak for themselves.
Good/cheap/fast -- I think we all know which two He chose!
God damn creationist!!! Don't you know the code elvolved!
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@dhromed said:
A casual observation of the human condition (viewed from both a cultural and biological perspective), has me pondering whether God offshored His work. He had a very tight Deadline, of course, and being Self-employed, He might have looked upon offshoring as a viable way of increasing production capacity -- but the results really speak for themselves.
Question is... who'd he offshore the work to?
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@sprained said:
I have it from a reliable source that God outsourced to the original CEWS: Brahma.@dhromed said:
A casual observation of the human condition (viewed from both a cultural and biological perspective), has me pondering whether God offshored His work. He had a very tight Deadline, of course, and being Self-employed, He might have looked upon offshoring as a viable way of increasing production capacity -- but the results really speak for themselves.
Question is... who'd he offshore the work to?
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@bstorer said:
@sprained said:
I have it from a reliable source that God outsourced to the original CEWS: Brahma.@dhromed said:
A casual observation of the human condition (viewed from both a cultural and biological perspective), has me pondering whether God offshored His work. He had a very tight Deadline, of course, and being Self-employed, He might have looked upon offshoring as a viable way of increasing production capacity -- but the results really speak for themselves.
Question is... who'd he offshore the work to?
Hence why Brahma created Indians: to do all of the hard work for him.
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God oursourced creation of the universe to Buddah. However Buddah wasen't too thrilled with the requirements and in silent protest made all workers reach the state of Zen. So essencially the great construction project was never completed, we are now stuck in protest (current state of the world). Though some non-believers have resumed work on God's oursourced project by making things like technology we must all join in on the protest for which we were created for.
Does that make any sense? If not then you are clearly not at the necessary state of
InsanityZen.
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Hello, I registered just to be able to give you an answer. I usually consider these web forums only as silly entertainment, but I thought this one deserves a real answer. I have been researching the issue for real, and can offer you the following:
Take a look at Synching or Sinking: Global Software Outsourcing Relationships. R Heeks, S Krishna, B Nicholson, S Sahay - IEEE SOFTWARE, 2001. It will answer your question quite well, because it gives you insight on why outsourcing may fail. You will also get some well thought of how to assess the chances. You can get the article from ACM's or IEEE's sites for free.
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@Khurram said:
There are many success stories of outsourcing offshore, that’s why big companies are increasingly outsourcing their business functions to low cost providers. Advantages are for both, if both companies fairly work with each other and respect each other’s policies, there is nothing left for making outsourcing a success.
KhurramModerator's note: advertising removed
You're obviously biased... and spamming. 90% of the indians that I've worked with in the US were grossly incompetent programmers, not to speak of their lacking management and grooming skills.
