Outsourcing to small vendors: What to consider?

Few days back I was having mail discussion with a friend of mine on what are the prime considerations of outsourcing a project to small vendor.
I personally have worked with both a small size outsourcing firm in India named Rightway Solution (www.rigthwaysolution.com) and significantly large outsourcing partner and system integration company at Singapore.

Below are some of the snippets from our discussion:

Just wished one favor from u. I have some project which I need to outsource to india. Can you please tell me the name of the site where I can post my req, so that bidders can bid on it? Also, can u plz tell em the name of the company where u had done ur first job and u worked on outsourced projects? Also, any hints or pitfalls to be taken care of while outsourcing projects?

Regarding .. the outsourcing stuff.. You can go to some e-lacing site.
www.elance.com is the best in the league.. very sophistacted. There are some small ones too. I don't have their URL on top off my head..but you can google them.

Pitfalls.. Make sure you choose the good vendor..who has both the quality..and timely delivery.. As you know.. in the outsourting.. the Delivery model.is very critcal.. So you be in look out of the vendor which has very sound delivery model.. Won't say it shoud be very sophistacted.. but very roubust.. of good quality.

Rightway. the company I worked..has a very good track record.. They are not a big player in elance.com but they are established vendor in some of the other elancing portal... not able to recall there name.

Second aspect of the outsourcing is the communication.
-The way you communicate your requirement.
-The way you monitor the progresss of the project
-The way you gauge..the honesty and quality of their work.
-The way you get things delivered..
-The terms and condition...payment.etc.

For all this communication is the corner stone..and its of paramount importance..when you don't see the opposite party physically.

1) For a j2ee project, what delivery model can be thought of? I perceive it as a war file that can be deployed on my server. The db setup and other things would be just scripts which I need to run. All the necessary documents (like TD, FD, test plans, etc.) should be delivered as they occur in the phase of SDLC. Please suggest me if you can conceive any other model.

The final software (piece of code) and documents are as much important as much is the visibility of what is the architecture, the whole code and details about enhancing/maintaining that code. Typically the customer/client who are assigning the project to outsourcing partner are much bothered about the final software delivery and pay less attention on the documentation or the overall design of the software..
So I think the focus should be all different aspects of the software and not just final piece of code.

- Key to the delivery is the Project Plan. Depending on the size of project there should be a accurate project plan (both high level and detail level) should be agreed upon by both client and vendor. Appropriate milestone should be laid out and one should make sure there are no slippages.
- Regular status update meetings where the client and vendor sit to gather and take the stock of situation. Any issues should be raised up. Proper status report template should be followed. Close watch should be kept on the whether the milestones are met properly or not
- Regular technical discussion/ walk through specially during the design of the architecture and over all solution. Mind that you would have very less time to and rather it would be too late to rectify any design goof-ups at the latter stage of the project. So the piece of code could be just mere speck and of no use if the core is in mess.
- I would advise to have regular signoffs. This is in tandem with your Project plan. Any milestone should be signed off by the client. Vendors are typically reluctant on this since it affects there flexibility.. but I would advise you to insist on this if the size of proejct significant.

Overall one should be closely watching the overall developments happening around.. even though there is not physically proximity but through various communication channels.

I won't recommend to follow the exact SDLC cook book if you are dealing with small vendors. Yeah design documents are critical and get them done. Not so formal/sophisticated in terms of templates/formats. But they should be readable, understandable and comprehensive. It doesn't matter if you one wants to call it LLD of HLD
etc. 2 levels of design document is advisable if the size of the project is significant.


2) I am sure it would be financially beneficial to contact rightway
directly, rather than through eLance. Agreed? Also, does that approach have any cons in terms of accountability or fraud?

Yeah approaching rightway directly would be beneficial. The only advantage you get if you go via elance is that the payment is done through Elance. So you pay to elance and they pay to vendor. However it involves some commission at part of client and vendor.
Its your call. Rightway.. have pulled of from Elance since most of there business comes from other channels like references, existing clients etc.

If you are thinking of Java/J2EE, Rightway does not have much expertise in it. There forte is PHP and .Net/ASP. Just a thought here. PHP is no doubt a proven scripting language for web applications. Its robust, has lot of supports of various backends, open source and I would say its being used, grown and nurtured actively by a large community. Even a small to medium complex applications could be designed/developed perfectly and efficiently using PHP.

Rightway no doubt has tons of experience in this technology. They have best practices, a very good processes and design/development methodologoies around PHP. And PHP is easy and good to maintain. Very much
portable with wide range of web containers. So think.. rest its your call.

3) Code copyright can be enforced..right? So, a buyer of the service would own the copyright for the code and not the service provider..rt? (This should be obvious, as is the case with TCS ,Wipro, Infy, etc.)


IP (Intellectual Property) is something you can enforce on vendor. To be honest no one can stop any one using the code. However you can have some legal contract of how IP is to be managed. Usually the vendor does not sell the same code/product as it is to other client. They obviously reuse some of the generic component/ best practices in other projects and no one can stop.