How does outsourcing work?

Outsourcing is a leap of faith for most: after all, it’s difficult enough to hire talented people where you are, so how can you trust someone you’ve never seen or spoken to? We understand your concern and consider building this very trust as the basic building block of a good relationship.

A few of your questions would be:

1. How will I assess your skills without losing too much time or money?

We encourage you to give us a small module or project just to test our skills. We’ll do it at no cost to you – if it takes longer than a week, we’ll charge you lesser than our hourly rate so you can evaluate us without loosening your purse strings.

It’s most important for us to build good relationships with our customers – the money is secondary.

2. How does the time zone difference affect all of this?

India is GMT+5.30, which means we’re 9 and a half hours ahead of EST and 12 and a half hours ahead of PST. (We do not change time for daylight savings here in India, so in winter the difference becomes 10 and a half, and 13 and a half hours respectively)

The difference means that we work as you sleep, which could be to your benefit. If you send us with a spec when you leave your office, a large part of it could be implemented when you check in the next morning.

Of course, this time difference also means that if there are any doubts or clarifications, they need to wait a day to get clarified. To avoid this, we suggest arranging meetings online (say a chat on ICQ, or even a conference call) in the morning as per your time – we’ll stay late so that things can proceed smoothly.

3. What do I need to do?

Outsourcing requires some work on your part too. The specifications would need to be clear and detailed. Communication from both sides has to be constant – we will mail everyday even if it is to only say, “Done”. Some of the other things that are to be considered are code reviews (for you to see how we code), code transfers (backups, version source), FTP or HTTP sites for data transfer and bug reporting (we have a format for this).

4. What about payments?

If we bill you per hour, we will send you time logs of work done every week. We can also work on a man-month basis, where you pay a fixed priced per developer per month or on a fixed-cost basis, where we give you a quote for a project.

Payments could be once a month or, in a fixed cost scenario, spread across milestones of a project.

5 ) How good are your Communication Skills?

One more aspect to consider is our communications skills: a concern you will have when contracting work to remote developers. We speak English at our office and are very comfortable in both the written and spoken forms of the language. Communication with our clients has almost entirely been on email - so we give you a guarantee that you will get a reply for any email within 12 hours on weekdays and within 36 hours on weekends.

We aim to make our communication lucid and precise – it should leave no doubt in the mind of the reader. This leads to a benefit in time – if something is clearly understood, then the development can proceed faster.

Our focus is on sculpting better relationships with our clients - we provide unconditional support for all our software, including the free components and the code we distribute.

If you like what you have just read, please don't hesitate to contact us. We can give you a cost proposal, references or other details that you may need. We can work together towards a good partnership.