Follow the Labor Pool
Though the cost savings were attractive, Comstock had even more pressing reasons for outsourcing the development for DriveGear.com. "The benefit for me was timing. I was trying to hit a specific deadline for an event that we were promoting," he explains. "I needed something up in a month, and [the Russian team] got it up in twenty-one days."
According to Walt Boyes, a principal at technology consulting firm Spitzer and Boyes, many companies had difficulty bringing their products to market during the Internet boom. "In the glory days of Web design, U.S. designers were booked solid and had waiting lists. If you wanted something done quickly, you went offshore."
Covansys's Massey says that finding qualified developer talent quickly and reliably remains a significant motivator in the trend toward outsourcing. "I'd be silly not to suggest that one of the issues is cost," he says. "What I would be very quick to say is that, unlike five or six years ago, that is not the primary driver today. The primary driver is access to the talent." Massey says that his company can locate talented engineers significantly more easily in India than he can in virtually any domestic location.
But Ajilon's Westin is skeptical that ready availability of developers necessarily means shorter development cycles. "A domestic team will beat an offshore team, schedule-wise, almost every time," he says. "It's not so much because of coding talent. It's because expectations are clearly understood, or at least significantly better understood."
Westin adds that an overseas development firm's pedigree doesn't necessarily tell you who's really working on your project. "Because you can't be there all the time, you never have the confidence level that those individuals and those résumés that you've reviewed are actually the ones on it," he says.
In some cases, developers might be called off your project for unexpected reasons. As Boyes remembers, "One project I worked on with a Romanian software company stopped for two months while they all went back to work in the electric blanket factory, getting out a big order. You must be certain they can do what they say they can do. This means carefully investigating their references, and if possible, visiting their facilities."
Comstock suspects that his American development partner failed to be so diligent, and that this inattention was a key reason why he didn't get the work he expected in the second phase of DriveGear.com. "Probably, the American firm had not properly filtered, interviewed, or rated the Egyptian group before hiring them," he says. "They really should have done better homework on it."
Are We Communicating?
One point on which all experienced outsourcers agree is that it's inadvisable for any company to charge blindly into an offshore partnership. Working with overseas developers introduces unique challenges, not the least of which is bridging the communication gap between cultures.
"One of the things I look for in an offshore partner is English fluency," says Boyes. "Luckily, in the Indians, the Romanians, Russians, and Bulgarians I've worked with, I have been able to find people with excellent English."
Massey, too, has had little difficulty finding developers with English fluency in India. "The language skills are typically very strong. Virtually any student of any secondary school, and certainly any university in India, is taught English at that level, and they're actually taught classes in English. Their schools run in English on everything but the elementary level."
But Ajilon's Westin points out that just because everyone at the table speaks English doesn't mean that all parties will understand every point equally. "One of the problems I've had a lot of the time with offshore is that I'll say something, and it appears that the individual words are understood. It's just that the order in which they appear doesn't seem to make sense to them, in many cases," he says. "We'll sit down, and we'll explain, and we'll go over requirements. Everybody will agree and nod their heads: 'Yes, we understand.' And they can even echo it back. But when you get the development work back, something got missed in the translation."
According to Atul Vashistha, CEO of global outsourcing provider neoIT, Americans often fail to take into account differences in dialect among English speakers. "For example, in India it's common to hear the suppliers say 'yes' to everything," he explains. "When they do that, they don't mean, 'we agree.' All they mean, most of the time, is that they hear."
Written communication can help to overcome some of these problems. "One of the important things is to design the site on paper in fairly extensive detail first," says Boyes. "This has a great advantage when you're dealing with people for whom English is a second language. They generally read and write it far better than they speak it, so this gives them a 'bible' to refer to and study."
Cultural understanding, Vashistha says, is equally critical. "It is also important to be aware of the local holidays, and so on, of the supplier's country. This comes with paying attention and being considerate."
For Comstock, unfamiliarity with the Egyptian development team's culture was a significant problem. "They were never available," he complains. "They didn't seem to want to put out any extra effort. The engagement lasted four months, and they must have had ten holidays weekday holidays."
