While in India and working on my first outsourcing project, I survived a contracted company’s closure, an under-experienced programmer paid slightly more than a street sweeper and several rebirths… of deadlines. I ended up burning the midnight oil to shorten delays while my collaborators remained unphased and more importantly, unable to take stock of the situation.

I’ve been in India for several wonderful years now. I’ve been web designing professionally since 1998, starting out in Los Angeles, California. Something about Asia had always appealed to me and one day I took a one way plane ticket out of the US. That was six years ago…and I never looked back. Mind you, I still visit friends, family and clients from time to time, but it’s safe to say that I plan to be in India for a while. Upon settling here, I was approached by clients to develop new websites. One of them approached me with a fairly high profile e-commerce site with a modest budget, and I thought this project would be a good time to dive into outsourcing with local consultants.

When I called upon a small (twice-defunct, thrice born) IT company in Ahmedabad India, I thought it to be a ship with a captain and a crew. I realized a little too late that there was a vast difference in my standards and theirs. Eventually I had to become both the captain and the crew. I found myself steering the ship every inch of the way on all aspects from front to back end. Clearly, there were some vital cultural differences that I had failed to anticipate, and which many are likely to face when outsourcing, whether as specialized consultants or direct entities looking to take their business online. My advice to such entities is to always have a qualified project manager, whether in-house, independent or hired by the IT company you are dealing with. By qualified I mean a sharp, knowledgeable, critical, analytical and responsive. If you are the only one coming up with comprehensive solutions to problems, then you could have an issue on your hands, because the technical implementation of the solution is a reaction rather than a proaction to a problem that had not been foreseen by the developers.

On a more technical note, the coding style that this company was using was ghastly and absolutely unmanageable. The company’s co-founder and technical director advocated CodeCharge Studio, a clunky WYSIWYG Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to code the site. There were no separation of design/content, poor or no use of classes, no separate template files for header, body, sidebar, footers etc… and no coding standards or comments. They had claimed to know PHP and MySQL but as with most companies here, were only proficient with ASP and SQL Server - read Microsoft products.

They were not ill-intentioned, but simply had no clue what “design and usability” meant by European or American standards. My expectations were unrealistic and I didn’t have enough technical elements to assess them before this project started. This is why an onsite consultant is so important. In the end I had to set aside all of my other activities to see this project through and I did managed to deliver a solid solution with a good life cycle. Lucky for me and my client, I was onsite and had a working knowledge of web development.

I am going to tackle some of the issues I faced in this first project-cum-trial by fire, and their implication in the same manner that I go about preliminary project briefs: from the point of view of the humans involved… and they fall into these three broad categories:

1. the client/visitor,
2. the business/individual/organization
3. the web developers/consultants

In this case, let’s work backwards from the third group to better understand the repercussions of the issues dealt with…

The Web Developer’s Perspective

Let us suppose I had been corresponding with this company from abroad, I certainly would not have been able to keep them in the office until the wee hours of the morning or to make them code and recode until the quality was satisfactory. And the consequences would have been crippling for the future development of the site since it takes a programmer 10 times longer to update such a site than a cleanly coded one. And it’s also far more treacherous to keep track of updated and possible bugs.

The Business/Individual/Organization’s perspective

Just to list a few of the issues you may face with such projects and small IT companies (some of which have glitzy websites):

1. Backend usability is often neglected making it unfriendly to use and often impractical, the reporting too
2. Dysfunctional layouts - for example, a submit button that appears at the top of the form instead of the bottom
3. Crude navigation: filtered list views that becomes unfiltered after updating/viewing one of the list’s item, redirections to neglected pages, unnecessary steps in a checkout process, etc…
4. Design that looks so 1997 - I really think that less than 1% of Indian IT companies are capable of producing designs that stand up to the competition on a world scale - Take a look at their portfolios, I can spot one of those websites from a mile away
5. Differing values on the importance of punctuality
6. Poor or awkward language style - you will have to write the copy of every page down to the error messages on form validations

What all of this means for your business in a nutshell can be any or all of the following:

1. a shortened life cycle for the solutions you outsourced,
2. dissatisfaction of your employees when using the solution
3. inadequate needs assessment of your business that results in a limited ROI or worse a negative one
4. a poor business image
5. costly site maintenance and difficulty to retain quality programmers on a small budget
6. security risks that can make you legally liable - outsourcing is no joke, if you are in the US or Europe and your customers’ information is compromised, there is a good chance that you will be liable.

The client/visitor’s perspective

Well a poorly designed site makes for a poor user experience, and visitors will be quick to search for a better site. Moreover, the quality of a company’s website is one of the key factor to building prospective customer confidence. In addition, customers are far more reluctant to enter their personal & payment information on a sub-standard website.

Conclusion and more to come
Ok, I’ve spoken at length about the risks of outsourcing to small and medium unknown IT companies when starting out. Fortunately, I have also had wonderful experiences. And this first experience by no means implies that all small Indian IT companies are alike. It’s just a crash guide for newcomers. Some companies are absolutely brilliant, and they know their worth. Those who advertise rock-bottom prices, will deliver rock-bottom solutions. So beware of expecting too much bang for your buck… it could well blow up in your face.

I am going to post again on this topic. Now that I’ve stated the issue, I think elaborating a solution is in order. In my next post I will attempt to explain how to avoid falling into such problems.