Outsourcing Hell
It’s only with a little distance from the recent projects in question that I can bring myself to talk about my recent outsourcing experiences without breaking down in a quivering, blubbing mess. Buoyed by the likes of Tim Ferris and his Four Hour Work Week, and the subsequent and numerous spin-off blogs promising a life of tranquility, leisure and pleasure whilst underpaid minions in far-flung places do all the leg work for you, I quite my succesful design business I threw myself headlong into this outsourcing nirvana. Let me tell you, after a 100% disaster rate, the outsourcing game is a difficult animal to tame. I’ve tried over 10 projects, all with clearly defined goals, objectives and outcomes, with 5 different outsourcers and all have not only been a failure, but have also driven me insane with frustration at the terrible quality of work, the relaxed attitude to timekeeping, the appalling level of service, the haphazard communication and the clear lack of regard for the work. Here’s some recent experiences that my therapist advised would be good for me to share. This last year or so, I’ve been trapped in a hell-of-my-own-making struggling to get 2 websites built. I designed all of the pages for SurfBodySoul in October last year and created a comprehensive spec document which, against my better judgement, I gave to Shine Sudarsan to build for me. I met Shine in Varkala, Kerala a year or so previously and put a couple of small web projects his way which he excelled at… then I gave him the build of my Soul & Surf website as we prepared to launch our Surf & Yoga retreat in India. As soon as he sensed that this was an important site the attitude seemed to change, emails and calls went unanswered for days on end. A few of the pages were sloppily thrown together and then as our deadline approached and then receded he completely disappeared. For days, then weeks. I had to pull all all sorts of favours and pay full western prices to get a friend back home to get our site live and our business launched. Shine popped his head back up above the parapet once the site was live and apologised, saying he’d been ill, close to death in fact and he was sorry…. So I gave him another small one page website job for a test of my SurfBodySoul business. He did a good enough job so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. So it was with this recent experience in mind that I gave the build of the full e-commerce SurfBodySoul site to Shine in November last year. His price was keen and his promises seemed sincere. We agreed on a 6th January launch date and I paid him 30% few upfront as a gesture of goodwill. And there everything ground to a shuddering halt, I received the odd dismissive email here and there over the following weeks, but saw no project plan, no work-in-progress and no signs of the project having commenced. He emailed every now and then randomly promising that all was well and the site would be live in January. But the radio- silence, the lack of questions, the lack of a plan and the vague nature of any responses I received from Shine alerted me to the trouble ahead. Of course January 6th came and went without my website, or even a page having been built. I got a vague email around this time saying he needed a few more days to finish the site - without ever having sent me any work in progress - as if…. By February my increasingly frantic attempts to get in touch with Shine were met with an eery silence and mid way through the month I had to give up with Shine and look elsewhere for a developer. I interviewed 5 Indian companies of varying sizes, I reasoned that I would pay extra for a company so that a single developers illness or kidnapping would not completely de-rail a project, and settled on the keenest one who came down from Madurai, a 12 hour journey, to meet me to seal the deal. I gave him the original design files and the specification document and agreed a fee, a 6 week timescale, the build technology - Joomla was best for this kind of site I was told - and awaited his project plan with baited breath. After a week or two I received some page designs, they looked a bit like the designs I’d given Gokul, as if someone had glanced at the Photoshop file and then coded it from memory, but no project plan. “Don’t worry about that, everything is in hand” Gokul chirped, a phrase I was to hear about 7,000 times over the following 6 months. I never did get that project plan, and I never did get the site I ordered. I never did get even the merest hint of an apology over the delays, the lack of functionality, the lack of a CMS, the lack of service… the lack of a website for another 6 months. What I did get was burst blood vessels and a near hernia as I repeated, over and again, day after day, week after week, month after month, a groundhog-day-esque “Can you just make the page look like the original designs I sent you, can you make it do what I asked for in the spec sheet”. As the project slithered, snail-like, toward completion, with accuracy and functions dropping by the wayside the importance of just getting something up and live outshone the need for accuracy. I just didn’t want to have to say the same words to Gokul every day for the rest or my life. Towards the end Gokul would explain to me, as if to talking to a small child “Oh no, no, no, you can’t do that in Joomla!”, “No, no, no, it’s not possible for your customers to actually buy the product AND download it silly”, “What!? You want to be able to edit the text on the pages? No, no, no you fool that will not be possible here, just edit the html if you want to make a change”. I can’t believe I’d been so silly. Why on earth would I expect that the site specifications I had provided Gokul with, that he had quoted from, and that he had advised we use Joomla for, would be fulfilled? I must be mad. Shine re-surfaced in late March without apology but apparently he’d been kidnapped by his employers in Singapore and was therefore unable to communicate with me. He urged me to give him one more chance, and I can’t for the life of me think why, but I did give him a low risk job, just to see if his initial skill and service level could be replicated. My personal blog and creative portfolio site www.edtempleton.net needed a couple of extra features, a ‘follow blog’ feature, some ads and a design tweak. My thinking was 'how could he mess this up? - surely the worst that could happen was that he didn’t do the job and I was left with the site as it was, which was fine. I sound like a fool as I write this, but obviously I hadn’t considered the worst case scenario which was this. Shine, in attempting to ‘update’ my site, somehow ruined and lost the exisiting Drupal site, leaving a random-looking, contentless set of pages as my live site… for months. Shine didn’t even bother coming up with far-fetched excuses for this one. He just ignored me for a few weeks and finally without even a wimper handed my back my sites files and skipped off into the sunset owing me $250…. Ahhh the joys of simplifying your life with outsourcing! So I used an Elance.com sourced developer called Acervate who could fix it for me, in two weeks… It took 3 months but at least it’s live and pretty much how I wanted it to be. The lessons learned? Don’t ever farm out a web project without a full project plan detailing how and when every aspect of your site will be delivered. Don’t pay an upfront fee. Don’t think that simply outsourcing is the easy way to a stress-free work life. Quite the opposite. [FOOTNOTE: This post was due to go live over 2 weeks ago, but my site malfunctioned and I only just got it fixed. Who'd have thunk? }
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