Offshore Website Design and Development

Website Design, Development and Management is needed by small, medium and large scale business organization.
Unless you have an inbuilt IT team of development it is pointless to invest in an in house web designer, web developer and web support engineer. The ideal way to have your website functional and well maintained is to outsource the project to an ODC.

This mean you pay some monthly charges to the ODC and let them manage the website on behalf of you. This helps you focus on your prime hardcore business and not worry about the website logistics.

An ideal way to have a offshore development center manage your website is presented in the below diagram

The best of all ODC scenario

One of the best ODC scenario is when you have the situation that is a perfect blend of Quality, Quantity and cost effectiveness.

With my previous blogs I have put forth convincing facts of how India is an ideal ODC when cost effectiveness is the point of consideration.

When Quantity is the point of discussion, this can be well achieved with a strict project management that keeps track of minute deliverable and milestones. Proper time management and optimum utilization of time to meet project deliverable help to achieve the Quantity facto of ODC. To make it transparent, the projecct managers could be deployed on both side, the service provider side as well as the customers site. This will help to give a clear picture of the project status.

In order to meet quality no doubt CMM standards, ISO 9000 compliance are great ways to achieve them. However an international based of the same service provider would help to meet the quality standards more efficiently.

With an exposure to international standards and being in constant connection with the international market, you will be able to implement international quality to your projects. Best practices to keep logs, programming standards, logic and analysis approach will be a part of your organization. Above all a local existence of the service provider in the customers region, i believe adds more reliability and trust to the relationship.

Hence if the ODC service provider also has an international base then this acts like a hot chocolate over the brownie.

Why India for ODC - IT

Offshore Development Center for Information Technology is found the best in India. Based on statistics based by NASSCOM for the year 2005.

Growth of IT Professionals in India
The total number of IT and ITES professionals employed in India has grown from 284,000 in 1999-2000 to over 1 million in 2004-05, growing by over 200,000 in one year alone.

Indian IT Sectors: Growth in Professionals




Break-up of Professionals in the IT industry
Most of the new entrants in the industry are fresh graduates indicating the availability of a large pool of fresh resources each year as against the siphoning off of resources from other industries. A break-up of the 10 lacs professionals in different sectors reflect that the number of employees in the IT segment has witnessed the highest levels of growth over the last few years. This growth is attributed to the tremendous growth in demand for these services in the IT sector. IT companies recruited approx. 1 lac professionals in 2004-05. In the IT software exports only, the It companies have recruited over 75,000 professionals in 2004-05, compared to 65,000 professionals recruited in 2003-04.



With such skills in India and with a tremendous growth in IT sector in India, India stands as the best ODC in 2010.

An ideal ODC Model

Offshore Development Model, To whose who are new to the concept of Offshore Development Centers, let me share a model which could work as an Ideal business process for a smooth Offshore Development.

As I been preaching ODC works if you follow 3C'S - Collaboration, Consensus and Communication. In order to have 3C's a well defined business process and infrastructure needs to be in place.

An ideal ODC Model will be a transparent connection between both the onsite customer team and the offshore team at the service providers end. Below is an ideal model diagram.



Communication:
Using VOIP based video conferencing, telephone are great way to communicate. Cost effective VoIP based telecommunications have proven out to be a great method to communicate.
If one opts to find even more cheaper medium of communication then internet based audio calls using Skype, Yahoo, MSN and GTalk are great options. Emails and Chats are alternate options but the to fro communication gap increases.

Collaboration:
Collaboration between both teams do not really need a frequent visit. It could be well achieved using internet based tools such as webex, teamviewer and GoToMeeting.
These tools are great in sharing screen, discussion boards and remote operations.


Consensus:
A Consensus can be easily be achieved by means of direct interaction between both the onsite and the offshore team. Web giants such as Google have googleDocs which are really good for project management and document managements.

Collaboration, Consensus and Communication - 3C's to successful Offshore Development Center

I have been a great preacher about the importance of 3C factor.Collaboration, Consensus and Communication - 3C's to successful Offshore Development Center.

An Offshore Development Center [ODC] is an approach to have a dedicated team of programmers and developers who have been selected specifically to complement the customer's requirements. The ODC team has domain expertise and is well versed with the skills to execute customers instructions. ODC is bascially a customers team of dedicated people who work from a remote site [ service provider's site] in a secure enviornment. The infrastructure and the security are designed to meet the customers compliance sheet.

At times the ODC team has a counter Onsite development team which works onsite at customers end and closely works with the ODC team in developing the application.  

The ultimate goal is for an ODC to be a seamless extension of an organization's IT department

I find in India that there are ODC centers setup nearly in every urban city. IT is booming in India and is one of the fastest growing industry with constant technology up gradations and innovative approach towards day to days needs of life sustainability. 


In such environment the customer who opts for an ODC needs to consider few aspects which are beyond the standard ODC norms. That's where 3C's come inline. Collaboration . Consensus . Communication


Does the ODC that you are considering have a mindset to collaborate? How fast do you reach the point of consensus with the service provider? Are you able to communicate properly?
 
Collaborate:
Its all about team efforts. An IT application is never a one man show. To have a high scalable, good performance and seamless product developed you need a team of skillful personnel working together. The team needs to collaborate towards the common goal. Unless you are able to set up an alliance the application cannot integrate. In cases where you have an onsite team working with the ODC, you need to have your project implementation plan well in place with proper instruction and understanding of collaboration. 


Tools like Microsoft Visual Source Safe is great for check in checkout of codes and maintaining a common repository of the application. Code writing standards, code commenting patterns and release notes need to be properly written in order to collaborate with each other.




Consensus:
"Agreement in disagreeing to something" will that be ever possible? 
Well if not agreement but compromise to have the best . Consensus between the ODC and customer's team is important. People tend to contradict each other not because it is factually wrong but because they say it is wrong.
In development of an application when we work with ODC it is natural that there is a cultural change. the coding approach will be different, the programming approach would be different. But as I rightly mentioned above we need to reach to a consensus. A compromising state to take the best from both world. when we reach to this state thats when we get THE best.





Communication:
Sitting miles away from each other, the only way to express your progress of development is to COMMUNICATE. Communication breaks all barriers. ODC and customers team needs to have constant interaction.
I would love a sprint and a scrum meeting to be in place on daily and fortnight basis, share about the development, progress, issues. This keeps a complete transparency between both customer and ODC which builds a complete trusting relationship that lasts long.
Customer deserves to know exactly what is happening in the project; after all he is funding the entire project and infrastructural expense incurred.


I am sure if we have the 3C's in place the ODC is eligible to be considered for a project. 


The ultimate goal of a customer to have a cost effective, highly skilled ODC which could become a seamless extension of an organization's IT department is met with proper Collaboration, Consensus and Communication.