Phil

I’m going to join in and tell you I enjoyed the post.

I work on a lot of projects of various sizes outsourcing often to several sources. Like most, this is >50% India with ‘the rest of the word’ (for me it’s Canada, Indonesia, US, South Africa in that order). It also gets more interesting when you have repeat projects. While I do bang my head against the wall in frustration at times, I am fascinated by the whole thing. I’m even vaguely considering taking a trip to India partly to get a closer look.

Interesting extrapolation:

which we’ve come to find they typically outsource the programming themselves and function as a liaison between the companies abroad and you the client and charge you a premium for this service

and

In other words you are the project lead (interesting how much of the rest of the myth-busting boils down to this)

As you say, getting things outsourced well is tricky. You seem to have been managing the outsourcing of something that you could have done yourself given enough time. That gives you one massive advantage. Imagine outsourcing something that don’t know about.

The people who gave you the quote in the US don’t just have to do what you did (be the project lead), they also have to work with you, the client who may have no idea what he/she really wants or some really terrible ideas. I’m not saying that you should have gone with them, far from it. Just pointing out the role in the process they play professionally which is, I think, an interesting one.

I also have a suspicion that the people playing that role should be in India themselves.

As the old saying goes “before you judge someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes…. this way when you do judge them you are a mile away and you have their shoes!”

You bring up some interesting points and they certainly do have merit. With that said this was an enormous project and anyone taking this on is going to experience large amounts of frustration and a ton of headaches, it’s just the nature of the beast. Is that worth the savings? I guess it depends how much money you have and the scope of the project. In our case we had 3 full time programmers working on it for 11 months, it was a BIG project. There were additional support used for design and security when those items came up. Additionally, my business partner and I worked on this full time testing and developing. In the USA an average programmer will make around $65k/annually, a senior programmer will make $75k+, in India a senior programmer will make around $15k/annually – the savings are significant. The actual amount saved will of course vary dramatically based on the size and scope of the project, on a simpler e-commerce site the savings will be less because the project itself can be buttoned up, from a programming standpoint, in 1-2 months.

The site is currently launched, but we are not pushing too hard at the moment, we are working on forming a new partnership which will require some significant reformatting, we don’t want any more data and users on our site then necessary until this either falls through entirely or we complete the reformatted site – a partnership deal will require a very significant facelift. We’ve been able to test our systems live and thankfully things have held up well, a few minor snags, but nothing close to catastrophic.

This is what has always fascinated me. Based upon his last paragraph (and just in talking with him), I know he’d do it again, albeit slightly different. I keep wanting to give it a shot, but then I wonder if it’s just easier to pay the premium to have better communication.

Except for one part: the Mystery Blogger seems to have way more patience, understanding and compassion when I could master in a similar situation. From reading this passage, I definitely see how they got frustrated with the extra resources, communication and hand-holding that was required, but I also see them standing up and looking for ways to understand the people 7,000 miles away and looking for ways to relate to them and win over their trust and commitment. This is really admirable and made me think very hard about what I could have done differently.

Mystery Guest Blogger – thank you for sharing the depth of your experiences, and good luck with the launch!

Would love to know what the site is, and I hope once it’s launched you’ll be able to share that with us.