Similarities in your dentist and offshore development company

The relationship with your off-shore development team is more like it with your dentist. It’s painful but you don’t see other way out.

Your dentist is doing his job, has got his degree and you have seen many other patients in the lobby. You may have even heard from one of your friend or relative that this dentist was good. You even saw very nice ad in the flier or news paper and you may even had a coupon. So, you were comfortable going to him for extraction or root canal or whatever you were going for. But he gave you pain, he charged you money that your insurance did not cover, he suggested few other teeth have to be extracted or a major surgery was required and you had pain in only one teeth. More, after visiting him, pains in other teeth started as well. He asked for regular cleaning every three months and you thought it was his way of making more money. Doesn’t this sound like a typical dentist experience? And now, there is no way out, if not this you will have to go to another dentist to save other teeth.

Now ask a project manager or director who just worked with an offshore team for his latest and greatest application. The offshore company had a great website, and a relative or friend or a competitor of yours used the same or similar offshore company for his project and saved lot of money. You sent email and were followed back by clearly understood English in foreign accent. You sent the requirements, held some meetings over the skype, phone, webex, go2meeting and they said “yes, agreed”, “completely understood”, “exactly”, “yup, that’s what you need”, “we have done the same thing for other clients” etc. And that was probably the last ‘nice’ talk you had. After that you thought ‘they don’t understand what we mean’, ‘they are not as fast as we want’, ‘the issues reported are still not fixed’, ‘the number of issues are going up and not down’, ‘are we going to meet the deadline’, ‘oh gosh! I better be dead’.

The project doesn’t meet deadline, and you have to allocate more money now. The things you thought should have been included in the scope are actually not and would cost extra. No the site does not work in Firefox, it works only in IE.

So, the process of getting this done is now ‘painful’. Your peer director or inhouse developer asks you how your outsourcing project is going and he smirks and you know what he means. What should you do now?

Now, let’s look at this from the other side.

Your dentist thinks (about you) that

• You seem more polite than others I have seen
• You even look educated and sophisticated so your teeth will be easier to deal with
• You are financially well and your insurance covers everything

But, when you open the mouth,

• Oh yuck, it stinks
• Why the h*** parents don’t teach how to brush
• This guy definitely needs surgery but he won’t believe if I say this in the first meeting
• Let’s quickly fix this pain and will suggest about other problems later on
• Come on, he pays 30$ for oil change every three months, and can’t spend for teeth cleaning?

And so it goes with your off-shore development team as well. In the beginning when you approach, this is what they are thinking:

• This new project should be better than the last one
• We should have more freedom about the technology in this project
• We will learn new things
• Client seems polite and understanding
• Client offered to pay something in beginning so there won’t be problem in future
• We can put this in portfolio and get good reference

And as the project grows, team starts thinking

• Why don’t they (you) say this in the beginning
• Why they want to use free/open source tools
• They work 8 hours a day and expect us to work 10 hours that’s unfair
• If we work extra, where is the profit
• No, we have to start saying no for any new requirements
• They get what they are paying for
• And it goes on…

Yes, a healthy and trustful relationship between the off shore vendor and client is needed for a successful completion of the project. But all the projects that either fail or don’t meet deadlines go through some difficult time and conversation. It’s a topic for another post to discuss the factors for why offshore projects don’t go as smooth as we want.

(the image is taken from http://raisingeli.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/dentist2-293×300.gif. Please report in case of any concern.)