Good Finally Friday Morning

[cd34]

Originally Posted by Jim

Sparky, would you now recommend outsourcing?

In controlled circumstances, sure.

To quantify this project, I had a recent quote from two companies that were going to rewrite it for ~$15000 in 20-35 days. The prior outsourcing contract (if you calculate the time spent exclusively on this project) was $16000 for the development. If I had to put a price on the time I've spent on it, I can't really say that it was any cheaper than $15k -- and it was only done in 12 days because I spent more than 8 hours/day working on it.

Outsourcing failed me in this case because I didn't have a documented test procedure or acceptance procedure. Because our initial tests worked, we hadn't thought about the variables. Also, while development was going on, we were refining ideas and making changes which certainly added to the time involved, however, the end product by the company did not match the document that they wrote based on the requirements I had given them. I think most of that was a result of the distance, time zone issues, skillset of the programmer and the fact that English was a second language. Had we been able to have a face to face meeting (and no, videoconferencing wasn't a substitute), I'm sure that project would have turned out much better.

And what is outsourcing really? Technically, when you have web design done by someone else, aren't you really having that outsourced? Or web hosting? Accounting/Tax preparation?

To me, outsourcing is contracting work out to someone that has the ability, time, special resources or skill to accomplish something that you don't have time or can't handle inhouse. I think in the strictest sense of the word, whenever you turn over some aspect of your business to an outside entity, you've outsourced.

Whether I would outsource overseas? Sure. Urb has spent a little time working on a few things that we've got coming down the pipeline. Would I contract to India or the Philippines? Perhaps. Will I outsource Tech Support? Never.

That's not to say that there aren't some good companies out there offering remote support -- its just that I have a pretty concrete view of how I think things should be, and I would much rather have many aspects of the core business handled in-house.