RE: outsourcing technical communication
[snip...]While there are justifiable apprehensions and concerns regarding coordination and management, the outsourcing model works pretty well
Says you. I have now worked at three companies that used outsourcing to
offshore companies (mostly in India). All three have suffered missed
deadlines, poor communication, phonelines that are constantly busy
overseas leading to additional miscommunication and inefficiency, having
to work bizarre hours in order to "meet" by teleconference with offshore
workers, and several other frustrations, irritations, and generally good
reasons to forget about pushing work offshore to save a few bucks.
I have to defend myself on this point. I always keep the hours that my client keeps - that is, I'm always available for a meeting at any time, and the client can call me at any time. Meetings always work best if scheduled beforehand, as usual. I would suggest anybody looking offshore should build that expectation into the negotiations. If the contract house can't do that, then you have to add the time-lag to your cost. I see it as a customer-service issue. I provide a service to the customer, not the other way around. So I can't afford to add the extra burden of my time-zone to the deal - that diminishes my service. It's incomprehensible to me that other outsourcers would fail to make that effort. But then, India's a bit further to the right than Europe (geographically speaking, that is).
I think a large number of these issues have more to do with managing model than anything else. Why does the work have to be under your nose? I've worked in buildings where the developers rarely saw each other or their managers. Certain members of the teams filled the coordinator's role, and attended (way too many??) meetings, while the others did the bulk of the work. Among them, some rarely came into the office, although they were alotted realestate just the same. In any event, they met their deadlines with the expected quality because they were professionals. And their coordinators - the whole chain of mgmt - treated them as professionals, and expected professional results. The monitoring was done by peer review (reading code - not face-to-face), scheduling (soliciting feedback when drawing up the schedule via email, then posting the schedule on the web), status reports (email again), and milestones (work was submitted/merged over the network). Of course there's the "synergy" that comes from hanging out in the hallways, and there are the people who just can't contribute without "being there". But it's entirely possible that there are classes of work or projects that don't need this synergy. It's equally possible to engender this synergy remotely. It's all about the enthusiasm of the contributors. If the idea is exciting, it will carry through remote communications. Or that has been my experience, anyway.A T1 line and two 8-hour shifts that ensured working hours between offshore and onsite overlapped plugged any potential communication gaps.
We've got that, too, but our communications gaps are HUGE. Consider that
you're not only farming out your work to contractors, but remote
contractors who are thousands of miles away, and who have poor
electronic infrastructure (as evidenced by our own experience with it
--- constantly unavailable phonelines prevent teleconferencing, network
connections that are frequently broken, etc.). So not only do you have
to deal with the disconnect of the contractor vs the full-timer, but you
have the cultural disconnect that affects communication, the fact that
the work is not under your nose to keep an eye on it, the minutiae that
enters into daily work that requires training or wasting time with the
offshore project manager at your head office (if you even have one of
their pm's here) because they don't understand a process that has become
standard practice in your office or in your market niche. Even the
difference in English for tech comm is an issue. Docs written in India
tend not to have standard US English, and some docs that I have seen
were of a lower standard than I'd consider acceptable.
Having said all of this, I have no doubt that there are examples of
successful offshore arrangements. But...
[snip...]
I say that N. American skills are expensive. It's an unavoidable conclusion that comes from the stock market. If the tech sector is going through a "correction", that means it was overvalued. If the sector was overvalued, then the labor was necessarily overvalued as well. Whether or not you agree that it was overvalued, that is the message (read "pressure") coming from the market. There are various ways the sector can respond. Given the rhetoric du 'jour (so-called free-market capitalism), offshore outsourcing is a likely response. There's no way the cost of living in San Jose is going to drop enough to *allow* a tech writer there to compete with labor costs in India. Not in this decade, anyway. That forces telecommuting into the picture.But don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Indian skills are cheap- this is only relative.
But are you saying that North American skills are expensive? Or too
expensive? I think that companies that sell products primarily in one
market would obviously benefit from hiring people from that market to
create the products for that market. That seems like common sense... If
nobody can afford to buy the product, what good is it?
Either the cost of labor goes down or the tech sector collapses even further. Or so the investors will claim. How are you going to get a CEO if you don't pay him/her 50 to 100 times what you pay your tech writers? How will you get investment capital if you don't have a high-powered CEO? How can you afford a CEO if you have 100+ people earning six figures who do nothing more than make the product? So outsourcing has arrived - either to India, Dublin (but not any more - Dublin's too expensive), or West By God Virginia. No matter - the issue is that the workers have to live in homes that can be sustained by their wages, and all indications are that wages are going down.
And here's a question for you... If nobody can buy the product, what good is it... Exactly what products are you talking about? Have you picked up a computer rag lately? What new products are there? Games, printers, cell phones, PDA's, and faster CPU's (people are already yawning over the latest GHz threshold to be crossed). All the action these days is vertical - customer relations (like the company that inspired this thread), order processing, massive doc publishing, data warehousing, site development, etc. Name a tech writer who plans to buy a customer relations system. The vast majority of new products are about setting up a junk-shop on the web... Selling more crap faster and cheaper. (It used to be that pornography dominated internet traffic - now it seems to be advertising/commerce. Sigh...) If I can make such a product with crappy docs, but charge for tech support once I get a sale, what do I care? And what do I care if some poor schleb paying $2000.00 a month for a one-bedroom apt. in San Jose can't afford my product? He'll probably buy enough zircon-encrusted tweezers to keep my real customer happy, and that's what matters.
One caveat - Weapons are getting a burst of energy in the US these days (duh!). Given that they're ultimately gvmt contracts, outsourcing seems less likely, although I once read that Boeing tail sections are built in China. But I'm willing to bet the US Army wants US English in their tank manuals. What a silver lining!
Holy cow - I feel like I'm filling in for A. Plato here. I'm just talking about what I see. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Please!!!
BTW... I still want to know what these offshore houses are charging. Anyone? Anyone?
TTFN.
Tom
--
Chris Despopoulos, maker of CudSpan Freeware...
Plugins to Enhance FrameMaker & FrameMaker+SGML
http://www.telecable.es/personales/cud/
cud -at- telecable -dot- es
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