Outsourcing
According to Regent’s experience, outsourcing systems to low-cost countries usually leads to increased costs if they are not implemented correctly. In addition, worry-free is one of the most important keywords around Regent’s offering Turnkey Digital Solutions. The customer should therefore not be affected by 1000 questions about details because foreign consultants bombard with questions. Therefore, Regent may never transfer entire projects or management commitments to third parties.
At the same time, India has a space program far more advanced than anything Sweden can show, so there is no doubt that there are really competent developers even from low-cost countries. Regent’s goal is to take advantage of this competence while the responsibility and ownership must remain in-house.
Problems and common mistakes
For those who are not used to outsourcing, here are some things to keep in mind to avoid common mistakes and shortcomings many companies do.
- Do not transfer responsibility for the entire development. This almost always leads to substandard quality and systems that cannot be maintained. Even applications that look good on the surface are often so substandardly developed that they must be completely rebuilt when a change is to be implemented.
- Do not sign agreements with companies, for example as some kind of strategic partner for outsourcing. This means that the outsourcing company is the one who chooses resources and then it is often low quality because low-cost countries have a much larger proportion of developers with a lack of education and experience. Regent must capture individuals and hold on to those who are good.
- Do not bring people home for training so that they can then go back to their country and work again. All consultants with experience from Europe and the USA are sought after in their home country and will therefore leave the collaboration for better paid jobs when they return home.
- Replace consultants who do not deliver. Swedish attitude is often to give people a second, third and fourth chance. It works in Sweden where a majority of the workforce is highly educated. In low-cost countries, it is instead a majority who do not have the experience or training required of Western companies. Instead, there are thousands of resources available. Change consultant often until you find a person who delivers and stay with it for as long as you can. It can often be better to pay the person to sit on the bench just to keep him or her in the network.
To pick up a resource
Depending on what needs to be done, there are different sources to use.
First make sure with someone within Regent who has worked with outsourcing. There are several quality-reviewed resources that should be used in the first place.
If all quality-reviewed resources are already booked in other projects, new people can be recruited through the following sites:
Design
For graphic work such as web design, producing images or logos, 99designs is best used for inspiration, www.99designs.com . Important with design, however, is that there is a big difference in culture between countries, which is reflected extra clearly in design. Therefore, a local designer needs to take over after what is provided by 99designs.
When an order is placed on 99designs, you always get 100 wordpress templates that all look the same if you ask them to create a start page. Instead, ask to design a page with a very specific flow where there are no ready-made templates, then you get more variety in the proposals.
Animated graphics
Developer
Freelancer is used to hire an individual consultant, such as a developer, https://www.freelancer.com .
Freelancer
The quality of Freelancers varies greatly. Use a quality-assured Freelancer in the first instance, but if one is not available, a review of those who are picked up is required.
First, create a project and wait a day before you start comparing. The best do not always come the first hour.
Then follow the quality assurance below which consists of the following steps
Dialogue: Questions and dialogue with the consultant. All answers must be accepted for the Freelancer to get ok. Some questions are deliberately asked as open-ended questions. This is to see how the person formulates himself in English and how easy it is to have a dialogue. In case of crunchy language that cannot be understood, another Freelancer must be chosen.
Competence test: Send a competence test to the person and ensure that the result is good.
Review 1: After 3 days, a quality review must be carried out.
Review 2: After 2 weeks, another quality review must be carried out.
Dialogue
The process is long and should take at least an hour. Especially the last point to actively follow the person and see how he examines the system is important to form an opinion about the person’s competence.
Say hello 🙂
Question 1
To start with, are you a single freelancer or are you representing a bigger company?
Expected answer: The person should not represent a larger company with several consultants. Regent only wants self-consultants.
Question 2
Great. That is what we are looking for. I am representing a Swedish company called Regent. We have a lot of different development projects where we need help from Freelancers from time to time. Since quality is very important to us we rather work with a few talented Freelancers rather than getting new ones all the time.
Our projects span from a few hours to several thousands of hours. This means that we can give you work for several years if we find a good cooperation.
To be honest I kind of want to test you to see if you are a potential consultant for a long term cooperation.
One very important thing for us is quality as I have already mentioned. This means that it’s better to work a couple of hours extra to deliver something that is working perfectly instead of just delivering something in order to prove that you have been working. That only costs a lot of time for us in testing. You understand?
Question 3
Great. So, since quality is important for us. Can you describe a few things you can do in order to assure that the things you deliver are working before you actually deliver?
Expected Answer: Make sure the application compiles before checking in the code to github. Write unit tests and make sure they are ok. Read the requirements a last time and test against the functionality before contacting us to say that it’s done. Do not deliver something that only works, make sure it also looks good… etc…
Question 4
Are you working with other clients as well right now? That is, can you start today? If not, when? And how about your availability onwards?
Expected response: 40 hours per week with immediate start, or as required.
Question 5
We have as a requirement to work with teamviewer against our freelancers. If required, we also want to have discussions over Skype? Are you ok with that?
Question 6
How familiar are you with github?
Expected answer: If it is a developer, the person must have at least 1 project experience of github
Question 7
Description of the project and what is required.
Expected answer: The person should ask questions and show that they understand. Do not believe in answers like “I understand, can I start now?”
Question 8
Test the person. May be different from role to role, but for a developer the question below may be good.
I want to add you to github, and that you download the project and get it up and running. After that we connect by teamviewer and look at the application. I want you to describe what you see and what you think needs to be done. I want to see if you have the eye for details and quality.
After that we go through the source code and there I also want you to describe what you see and how you preceive the quality of the code written so far. Also come up with suggestions for improvements.
Termination
Thank you. I think you have what is required to proceed. I send you a list of tasks to do.
After this, you can assign the project to the person
Competence test
Carry out a competency test similar to one of these:
Review 1
After 3 days of work, a knowledgeable person must review the work that has been done. If it is junk code, poorly written language or otherwise substandard, the assignment must be terminated and replaced by another person.
Review 2
After 2 weeks, another review should take place in the same spirit as for review 1.