November last year we outsourced a significant part of our software development to India. We engaged a company in Bangalore to assist us in driving a number of initiatives. The engagement was a combination of dedicated resources and fixed cost project type work. The dedicated resource part of the engagement was setup such we considered the dedicated resources to be contracted staff. The rates were very reasonable and the new India based “staff” had access to our intranet and development environment. They used a variety of collaboration tools such as Skype and IM to be able to interact with our Aussie development team. Unfortuantly we had to make a hard decision recently and that was to disband the dedicated resources and continuing engaging with India solely on a fixed cost project basis. The reasons for this decsion were:
– The nature of our conversion from Enterprise to SaaS was not suited to India
- India had a large overhead of specification/requirement documentation and we were “feeling” the spec as we went. As we were converting our enterprise product to SaaS the concensus was “We don’t need fancy documentation and designs, just get it out there”. This type of philosphy does not work well with India outsourcing.
- We required design work to be completed and unfortuanty India dedicated resources did not fill this role
– There was difficulty with India participating in the full cycle of software development
- Requirement
- Design
- Implementation
- Testing
- Documentation
- Release
- Project Management
- Support/Maintenance
- Server setup: security, database setup, scripts, libraries
– We found India to be narrow in skill sets, i.e had depth rather than breadth
- Hard to communicate and direct since there was 5 1/2 hours timezone difference
- Found that India dedicated resources could not work with minimal supervision
- Poor code quality
- Communication was difficult, a lot of discussion required drawing up things and meetings
- Dedicated resources felt a little left out… hard to be team players
– We were switching gears with our SaaS rollout and were about to embark on:
- Architecture project
- Database redesign
- Requirements gathering and design work
hence as this type of high level work is best done inhouse we are now engaging India purely on a fixed price project basis. I’m glad we had the opportunity to try dedicated resources. At some point in the future we will attempt using dedicated resources again though there will be changes such as building a larger team so we have critical mass and appointing a team lead with higher level and broad skillsets.