Contrary to the popular believe in developed world, the outsourcing actually works quite well.
Let's face it - if all companies were worse of after outsourcing, then the practice would have died long time ago. But it didn't. In fact, now even more companies are outsourcing their work to offshore companies (most to India and other parts of Asia). Nowadays, not just IT but every other sector like law, education, engineering etc. being outsource regularly.
Since I am on IT sector, I can only vouch what is happening in this segment.
The traditional IT jobs in UK are very much based on imposed responsibilities. It means, employees are designated to work particular task – like developer will only develop the code, tester will only test, support personnel will just execute (without much thinking) and Business Analysts will only look at Excel charts. Moreover, managers won't have a clue what their development team is working and System Architects will have no idea of what it feels like working in a particular technology.
Most UK IT firms refuse to accept the fact that IT sector works based on role based responsibilities rather than designated based ones!
In Indian IT companies, same person invariably works like developer, designer or even in project manager roles. Not only it helps to understand issues faced by other team members, it also avoids boredom.
Support jobs are always boring. Testing is like necessary evil – not many people want to do it yet it is absolute critical for any application to undergo rigorous testing. I hate the typical project manager's question – how much percentage of the work is actually completed. Gosh, when will they understand that it is not a linear relationship? For first few months, there may be only 10% of work done. But in last month alone 90% work can be completed. How is that possible? Quite easy. When a project begins, lots of questions are left unanswered. The application is developed with voids in between. Now that application is as such worthless as it can't be put on practice for its desired role. But, when the voids are fixed, then application becomes fit for purpose. Till it happens, it is very difficult to give a percentage completion report.
I remember, one of my former project manager stopped asking me this question when I replied – it is just 43.3976% done and progressing on a logarithmic scale.
Ok, coming back to our off-shoring topic. So far we covered boredom and role rotation philosophy. But that is not all.
In India, most development work is done by fresh graduates (out of universities). They are quite happy to work at lesser salary (even on local standard compared to experienced people there) but with not unacceptable quality – because most of them are quite eager to show their expertise in programming logic.
However, on western economies, since people tend to do same work for decades, they usually attract higher salaries (local standard) with out much quality improvement. One reason here is that you can't discriminated based on age – which is quite the opposite in outsourced countries.
Since off shoring companies employ fresh candidates without real life experience, there is always a chance that they will produce junk output. However, this is taken care by strict adherence to standards. It is shame that many UK companies just don't follow any standards at all – almost everything is ad hoc!
The managers probably here don't recognize that just by implementing rigorous standards alone, a lot of time and money can be saved.
Standard implementation is complemented via documentation. Since people working in project are separated by several hours of difference time zone and no face to face interaction is possible – the onsite system architects have to be extra cautious to avoid any ambiguity in design documents.
Yes, sometimes it means spoon feeding everything to offshore team. But it works in longer run. The design document becomes so much fool proof that anyone can just blindly follow them and get things done.
Of course, there is cost advantage as well. But what I discussed here are just some other aspects of off shoring.
I shall continue this discussion later.
Let's face it - if all companies were worse of after outsourcing, then the practice would have died long time ago. But it didn't. In fact, now even more companies are outsourcing their work to offshore companies (most to India and other parts of Asia). Nowadays, not just IT but every other sector like law, education, engineering etc. being outsource regularly.
Since I am on IT sector, I can only vouch what is happening in this segment.
The traditional IT jobs in UK are very much based on imposed responsibilities. It means, employees are designated to work particular task – like developer will only develop the code, tester will only test, support personnel will just execute (without much thinking) and Business Analysts will only look at Excel charts. Moreover, managers won't have a clue what their development team is working and System Architects will have no idea of what it feels like working in a particular technology.
Most UK IT firms refuse to accept the fact that IT sector works based on role based responsibilities rather than designated based ones!
In Indian IT companies, same person invariably works like developer, designer or even in project manager roles. Not only it helps to understand issues faced by other team members, it also avoids boredom.
Support jobs are always boring. Testing is like necessary evil – not many people want to do it yet it is absolute critical for any application to undergo rigorous testing. I hate the typical project manager's question – how much percentage of the work is actually completed. Gosh, when will they understand that it is not a linear relationship? For first few months, there may be only 10% of work done. But in last month alone 90% work can be completed. How is that possible? Quite easy. When a project begins, lots of questions are left unanswered. The application is developed with voids in between. Now that application is as such worthless as it can't be put on practice for its desired role. But, when the voids are fixed, then application becomes fit for purpose. Till it happens, it is very difficult to give a percentage completion report.
I remember, one of my former project manager stopped asking me this question when I replied – it is just 43.3976% done and progressing on a logarithmic scale.
Ok, coming back to our off-shoring topic. So far we covered boredom and role rotation philosophy. But that is not all.
In India, most development work is done by fresh graduates (out of universities). They are quite happy to work at lesser salary (even on local standard compared to experienced people there) but with not unacceptable quality – because most of them are quite eager to show their expertise in programming logic.
However, on western economies, since people tend to do same work for decades, they usually attract higher salaries (local standard) with out much quality improvement. One reason here is that you can't discriminated based on age – which is quite the opposite in outsourced countries.
Since off shoring companies employ fresh candidates without real life experience, there is always a chance that they will produce junk output. However, this is taken care by strict adherence to standards. It is shame that many UK companies just don't follow any standards at all – almost everything is ad hoc!
The managers probably here don't recognize that just by implementing rigorous standards alone, a lot of time and money can be saved.
Standard implementation is complemented via documentation. Since people working in project are separated by several hours of difference time zone and no face to face interaction is possible – the onsite system architects have to be extra cautious to avoid any ambiguity in design documents.
Yes, sometimes it means spoon feeding everything to offshore team. But it works in longer run. The design document becomes so much fool proof that anyone can just blindly follow them and get things done.
Of course, there is cost advantage as well. But what I discussed here are just some other aspects of off shoring.
I shall continue this discussion later.
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