Here’s another one for the outsourcing horror story collection
My friend Matt often complains about some of the outsourced staff he gets stuck with on his consulting projects. He sent me this IM conversation that really illustrates his point:
- Matthew/Chicago/: Srini I’m in a room filled with 20 very concerned UAW workers trying to run their new line financial pareto reports for the US financial accounts. This is one of the BTO transition items I have to get setup for the client ASAP.
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt this is Srini.
- Matthew/Chicago: Yes Srini I know. I am inside of the report we are stuck on the case number selection field which has been searching for results for approximately 5 minutes without a result.
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt. Are you connected into the internet?
- Matthew/Chicago: Srini yes I am connected to the internet. There are no values showing up in the prompt selection. The report is failing. People are not happy I’m in a room filled with upset union workers. I’m wasting their time.
- Srinivasanu/India: Matt can you see if you can get to the Google.
- Matthew/Chicago: Srini I’m connected to the internet I’m speaking to you on the internet.
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt internet is not issue.
- Matthew/Chicago: You and the team marked this as a passed item in your SIT testing according to the client. Note the test cases all mentioned a specific value to search on 12501 for example case number 2 does not work. The users are trying to do the same it is not working.
- Srinivasanu/India: Matt yes I test the field and when the field didn’t return value I skip it.
- Matthew/Chicago: Srini did you skip everything that was not working and just mark it passed?
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt.
- Matthew/Chicago: So you have no idea what you’re doing? Is this a correct assumption?
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt.
- Matthew/Chicago: I think I’m in the Twilight Zone.
- Srinivasanu/India: I not get message Matt.
- Matthew/Chicago: Get up now walk over to Prasad and let him know you are no longer on my project. Tell him to get the entire team in a conference room in 10 minutes and to dial in my line. You’re not invited. Do you understand this?
- Srinivasanu/India: Yes Matt I think there is a problem.
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About
Thanks for visiting! My name is Keith Forsythe and this is my blog about product development, product marketing, mobile devices and general business practices at an Internet Startup.
I am currently co-founder and Director of Product Development at RideCharge, Inc (Taxi Magic), a startup mobile and web taxi booking service. Prior to RideCharge, I was an IT project manager as CVS/Caremark, and a software engineer at Baxter Healthcare. I have a MS in E-Commerce Technolgy from DePaul University and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana.
Holy s**t. I feel a little bit better about my job now.
Yea, that’s brutal. Outsourcing quality control on reports and user interfaces is a bad idea. Feels like they should do the QA here, and the development abroad.
In my experience working with outsourced development teams(likely in a similar job capacity to Matt) it is not much better.
Instead of a broken QA process you get hampered before you start with a broken development process.
Outsourcing QA can be reasonable when you’re on a tight schedule.
Just make sure you’re outsourcing to right people, do some pilots/demos, check testimonials, etc.
I’ve encountered more than my share of Srinis. But at the end of the day, for every 30 Srinis, you will find a guy who *does* know what he is doing. This reflects more poorly on your friend’s inability to find and gauge talent than on Srini(we know he’s hopeless).
So Zaid – does that mean that if i need a 10 person outsourced team that i should hire 300 people and slowly weed out the bad ones? That seems rather expensive and would defeat the whole purpose of outsourcing the work doesn’t it?
Brian you can do a better job at the interview and hire only the ones who know what they do
From the phrase, “the outsourced staff he gets stuck with,” I’m guessing that Matt has no choice over who gets hired.
No, it means you consider 300 people and hire 10 of them, pretty much like you would in the US.
But the native Indian manager’s impulse seems to be to hire all 300 and then fire like a machine gun. And you have to step in and shut that down before it gets going, or you are going to end up on a treadmill that guarantees no one gets properly trained or instructed.
Basically, it means you have to actually talk to these people, which involves thinking of them as people you are hiring, instead of ‘resources’. And that can be difficult over vast distances, time lags, and accent barriers.
The offshore equivalent of the consulting firm, the managers who chooses the workers, seems to be really, really bad, in my experience. They want to throw bodies at projects and throw work at bodies and then fire folks very lightly and hire new ones who still never get trained.
Or you could just not outsource and hire the workers in your own country. I’m not saying you deserve this, but with developers, you almost always get what you pay for.
Been there, several times, it got to a point where management decided to stop outsourcing to India, but still needed a solution. Then we started outsourcing to Phillipines and Panama, voila! problem solved.
Be carfeul, Brent, the site can be addictive. You may find out things about yourself that you wish you had never known. I had a lot of fun using it to find new blogs. There are a lot of links to the big sites, but if you avoid the well known names, you can find some pretty eclectic stuff. There is also another site that does the same thing, except for SEC filings, but their user interface is terrible compared to Walk2Web. I’m not a big fan of the audio, but it’s a neat site that they’ve put together.
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