In my last post I mentioned a few points about dealing with offshore developers. I want to add further to my last post by talking about the offshore vendor side of the story. Through my years of experience in a variety of roles, I have worked at all types of companies. ex: Enterprise IT(Verizon, AOL Time Warner), Products(Murex), Services(Sourcebits). I have been a client (Verizon, Murex, self) and a service provider. I have lived and experienced different set of challenges, which each side faces and their perspective of the story.
Here I list some of the issues which offshore developers face.
1) Clients generally give a very vague description of several features and some of these features are very broad and can be broken down to several sub-features. ex: include viral sharing capabilities. This simple line can be broken into multiple features depending on how you define it.
2) As mentioned in the previous post, service providers have many quote requests per day and the conversion rate is generally very low. It is very difficult to identify a deal which might be successful. In this scenario, you end up giving equal time to each quote request, there by doing it very superficially. And also, you are trying to turnaround the quote request as soon as possible to beat the competition(could vary from 24 hrs to 72 hrs). Once the bid is given it is impossible to increase it during further negotiations(time-frame after the bid and before the contract is signed).
3) During SRS phase it is very easy for clients to creep in the requirements and pretty much every feature can be adjusted to include several sub-features. Its basicaly playing with words and since the language(intentionally) is so vague in the requirements document , that can give any twist to it.
4) The project manager/delivery manager is focussed on optimizing the resources and completing the project on-time, finance/senior management is focused on making a profit and client tries to creep in as many features as possible within same budget. Amidst all this, one person who completely gets killed is the developer. On one side, he is required to finish the development on time, with quality, and on the other side he needs to keep the client happy sometimes fulfilling his last minutes requirement changes.
I will write another blog some other day on how to deal with these issues and talk about how a service company can sucessfully navigate the waters and make substantial profits(Based on my experience).
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