Personal Thoughts on Outsourcing …or Why I need your vote at SXSW

I love attending the SXSW Interactive conference every year. It’s my favorite conference of the year, a chance to learn, catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and of course have a great time.

Last year I pledged to myself that I would try to get further involved and organize a panel for this 2009. So I put together a panel submission covering a topic that I have a little expertise on and I think people are interested in hearing about.

Let me start by saying, my goal for this post is that you will click on over to the SXSW Panel Picker and vote for our panel and even leave a comment about how much you want to see it. OK, so now that that is out there, let me tell you why you should do that.

Our panel is called: Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not?

The topic of the panel stems from a discussion I had last year with Sandeep Sood of Monsoon Company, a fellow oursourcing firm, about the challenges of outsourcing web development work, whether the pain of working with a team thousands of miles away is worth it, and how to develop personal relationships that bridge cultural and geographical borders.

I am fortunate to have rounded up some great co-panelists for this discussion all of whom bring a different perspective to outsourcing and each of whom run a successful development firm:

  • Sandeep Sood – Sandeep runs Monsoon Company in Berkley with teams in India. He authors the Doubsourcing comic (recently featured in WSJ) and sends his apologies to Thomas Friedman that he believes the world is not yet flat in Forbes.
  • Qasim Mueen – Qasim is in Pittsburgh with teams in Pakistan. He is the co-founder and CEO of Zigron.
  • Andrea Azdril – Andrea is Los Angeles with development in Beijing, China. She is the CEO of StarTech Global and frequently travels back and forth from China.

Some personal thoughts on this panel that I’d like to share:

Submitting a panel topic about outsourcing web development work to a conference full of web developers feels a little like trying to sell ice cubes to eskimos. It definitely is a topic that may be somewhat taboo, certainly considering these economic times and what you hear in the media about jobs going overseas.

Along the same lines, I sometimes feel challenged talking about our business structure, and our Flatsourcing team with colleagues in New Orleans. I am friends with talented web developers locally who are looking for work, is it parodoxical to be passionate about supporting the local community while taking my work and having it done in Russia?

I think reconciling these feelings is a lot of why I believe this panel topic to be so important. There are real tensions and preconceptions about outsourcing, and the controversial nature of the topic is exactly why I believe we need to discuss it.

I fully expect to have the question thrown at me “Why are you hiring guys 3000 miles away instead of guys in this room?” And that will be a tough question to answer.

When I think about that question, it boils down my personal feeling that the world really is getting smaller. Imagine a world that truly was flat, so a business partner or employee on the other side of the world was as easy to work with as your neighbor across the street. Collaboration tools, broadband, and common language of software means you can work with whomever you choose.

In 2001, I met three guys over eLance because I needed someone to build a website for me, and I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t know anyone personally who could. They did a great job, we continued to build our partnership, and a few trips to Russia and eight years later we’re in business together. And asking me why I’m working with them over someone local simply boils down to the fact that this is the direction I have chosen, it is working, and the value of our relationships is not something that I measure in terms of how far away they are.

This may be the case for you, Chris, but what about if I am evaluating outsourcing now, with no personal history. I’m working with a clean slate?

Well, this is the discussion I have almost every day with clients. Outsourcing exists because there is global demand for talent and there is a global marketplace. Release the bonds of locale, and your hiring pool is global. Wouldn’t you want to explore the opportunity to hire top talent, anywhere in the world?

That is the reality of what you can do today.

It’s not about low cost, its about value. And value is driven more by quality than cost. Web development in particular is a marketplace that is fully globalized. It opens up a world of opportunity to build new “virtual” companies that transcend borders.

So, that is a sneak peak at some of the thoughts I am looking forward to sharing on the panel. I’d love you hear some of yours in the comments. Ask me the tough questions, I hope to be able to answer them.

I genuinely hope that we have the opportunity to discuss this at SXSW. You can help by voting for us here.

Thanks.

Meet the Team Behind Flatsourcing.com

Last week at SXSW, I often found myself in conversations, and being asked about our Russian development team, Flatsourcing.com. I’d like to take in this post to tell the story behind our partnership with the team at Flatsourcing.

I’ve been working with Oleg for almost 5 years now. He was the a project manager on the creation our first website, BachelorBlowOut.com, and we’ve been working together ever since. We met through eLance, the same way that many outsourcing relationships get started. And over the last five years we’ve grown to be business partners in every sense of the word. The growth of both our businesses has been directly correlated, and we’ve developed an interdependent and symbiotic business partnership.

At this time last year I took a trip to Kazan, Russia, to meet Oleg and his partners Timur and Alex for the first time. This was incredibly enlightening experience for me. in addition to the wonderful cultural exchange that took place, we were able to solidify the partnership between our companies. Since that time our business is taken off together and we’ve become a fully integrated team, albeit separated by thousands of miles.

I’ve always felt that we’ve had a very fortunate experience with our outsourcing partners, but over the years we worked very hard to build a partnership that works. I’d like to share some of the things that make our outsourcing partnership so successful:

  1. Trust - it takes time to develop the level of trust with your outsourcing partner that I’m describing above. But it’s important to take steps in that direction right from the start. This means putting systems in place to provide checks and balances for both parties for everything involved: financial transactions, deadlines, specifications, quality assurance, and communication flow. The more you put systems and best practices in place the better the level of trust you be able to establish. Our goal has always been to completely trust and empower our team in Russia, so that we don’t need to track their hours or remind them of deadlines. As we build trust on both sides of the outsourcing relationship the performance and execution has risen dramatically.
  2. Respect - Another primary factor in the evolution of our partnership has been the respect with which we treat one another. A lot of people get in outsourcing relationships looking for the lowest cost provider. I believe low expectations result from looking for low-cost, and with low expectations comes poor quality results. We set high standards for the quality of our outsourced work and we have full faith that our team is capable of doing everything we ask of them. And we are treated with the highest respect by our team in Russia, deadlines are met, communications are answered, and our expectations are always exceeded.
  3. Team - I believe getting outsourcing to work well is simple: do everything you would do if your outsourcing team was sitting in the office with you. Treat them as employees, empower them as business partners. Always treat them as if they were part of the team. That’s been the number one key to our success.

In addition to being prompted to write this post by the questions I received at SXSW, we also wanted to celebrate a shared success with our Flatsourcing team. Posted below is a Russian TV interview with the guys from Flatsourcing.com. enjoy getting our team and if you add any questions about outsourcing or Flatsourcing, give us a shout.