Offshore PreSales - tricks of the trade

Like every profession, 'Offshore Pre-Sales' In india also has it share of tricks of the trade.

• Pre-Sales and Business development works closely with Tech Architects and Tech Leads. Unless your project is unique and out of this world! Pre-Sales along with Tech team, will fit your project into standard architecture or 'framework'. This helps in re-using the proposals and also helps in quick turn-around to queries from the prospects. 
• Ballpark figure- typically a range with low and high end is offered to you, to assess your purse. Ball parks are used in variety of scenarios, but always ask for more details when ball park is thrown on how this number was arrived at!

IT Outsourcing to India? - Bargain hard and get thinkers

Planning to outsource IT project to India? - The series of blogs will help you to get some honest tips and tricks that will help you achieve success while working with IT firms in India.
For ease of communication, let me term you as 'client' 
Some queries you as the client may be going through, in your mind will be
"  How do get the offshore team balance right?  "

• While working in software services firm, i happened to work with some very sharp IT heads who does all the heavy thinking, and also with others who does the implementation with/without the big picture/detailed picture in mind. Delivery Heads of Software Services typically ensures that your project gets at-least one of such member 'thinker' in your team. If you are outsorcing work to India. Please do ensure that, you have that 'thinker'- who does the think through for your specific business needs. The best situation would be to have someone capable your client's rolls.

For a well balanced team of around 12 members, you should be looking for atleast three top notch thinkers within the offshore team, one for BA- Business Analysis(BA), Project Management (PM) and the third one other for Tech Leadership and Architecture (TA). If the project is smaller, you should be looking for a Technical Manager- who can play PM, BA and Architect role all by himself. Remember this is a hard find - but this is the crux of the team that you cannot compromise.

•  Offshore Companies typically infuse fresh graduates with few months of orientation into big projects, and bill them at the same rate as that of 3-5 years Software Engineer. The cost of such juniors will be just 5-8$ per hour, and in turn they can get billed at say $20 or more. So here is where smart clients do, they are always ready to pay premium billing rate for 'thinkers'. Billing rates for senior level 'thinkers' will be typically 30% higher. I have seen many smart clients, who bargain hard to get them. 
• If taking juniors in the team, do verify the resumes, get the interview done by your personell or by one of the 'trusted thinkers' from offshore team.

  Here is the catch-
  Offshore firms typically cannot allocate 'thinkers' full time in to your project alone.
  Thinker are fewer and are needed in all the projects being delivered for several different clients. So 'thinkers' work part time, but would end up getting billed full time for each client!

IT Outsourcing to India - Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M? Scrum or Waterfall

Planning to outsource IT project to India? - The series of blogs will help you to get some honest tips and tricks that will help you achieve success while working with IT firms in India.

Some queries you as the prospective Client may be going through, would be "Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M contract or Hybrid or other? Scrum or Waterfall "

Most IT developers in India, if given a chance, prefer building things with quality in mind, sort of “craftsman ethos”. Any other mode of work, gets blamed to time-pressure, so self-estimation tends to be more effective. FixedBid projects doesn't allow the room for self estimation, as the project is, already signed for a dollar amount and timeline before it reaches the team that is going to work on it. So, i would recommend "Scrum Process model in T&M" as the ideal way to outsource to India

•    Typically small to medium IT firms would like to work with you on a T&M model. The large part of risk is on client. If you are signing up for more than 8 to 10 FTEs and that too for a period of say, 1 year or more - the risk is lesser, you are likely to get a solid team of smart professionals. But, Scrum is the process model that helps you mitigate under delivery risks. The catch is to find services firms, with maturity in delivering through scrum. 

       Scrum means, you would need a smart product owner at your end, who can drive the project in an Agile model, with weekly scrutiny of time-sheets and work products, it does work, but it takes a lot of hard-work on client's part.

Remember that, in India you will find highly dedicated resources who works in a firm, just because he/she "likes" the project and the reporting head at client end. It is important you play a hard cop - soft cop role carefully. Remember that, if you go too hard with Account management team and too nice with delivery team, it will eventually spoil the relation.

My first blog

Been a while, thinking about blogging about my experiences, thoughts and ideas- I am someone who started as hardcore .NET programmer - all the way to tech architect, tech manager roles and IT director role.

Last 5-7 years has been rather interesting, as i worked with larger teams, enterprise class multi-million projects, entered into building a product development from scratch to finish etc...

In my posts, i intend to give you a honest sincere views on Creative Designining & Creative Designers, Programming and Programmers, Project Management and Project Managers, QA - the myth and facts,  Business Analysis and Business Analysts, IT Infrasturcture teams and how it all works together in a structure woven through a process centric (or adhoc structure) of Indian IT Service sector.