There are hundreds of companies who are copying us - our business model, our web site design, our style of doing business, etc. Though we do not like it, we consider it as a form of appreciation and ignore most of the times.

However this one stumps everyone else! This hilarious copyright infringement was done by a “reputed” Kolkata based company. They went to the limit of copying our D&B number which is a unique number assigned to a company by Duns & Bradstreet.

The DUNS number 91-848-3439 belongs to Indus Net Technologies and it can be independently verified with D&B (which of course is a reputed agency).

While copying (or let us say ripping off) our website, they even copied our DUNS number and are openly publishing it on their website. The funniest part is that they continue to do this even after getting a legal notice! I salute their arrogance. I hope they do not pass on the blame to their designer. They have given full support to this illegal activity by ignoring the legal notices sent to them. So I  wish that the ignorant designer is not fired who did what he was asked to do - i.e. to copy our website content and use.

Best of luck to them! This won’t help in growing the company for long.

Indus Net Technologies will be exhibiting its capabilities at Internet World 2008, Earl’s Court, London between 29th April and 2nd May.

See how:

• We can take your website to the next level and make it a lead generation machine for your business.
• If you are an Internet service company (web design, web development, Internet marketing), we can reduce your cost of production and help you take up business that you are unable to address due to your overflowing order book!

Do drop in for a chat!

And let us know in advance, so that we can send you a FREE invitation card.

See you there!

PS: You might not know us from our title brand. So if you are dealing with any of our group brands, the invitation stands for you - Design2Please, Script2Please, Submit2Please, Host2Please, EasySiteEdit, TemplateKingdom, Hire-A-Designer, ClickWorkForce!

Over years, I have come across several Indian companies which would force its employees to interact with their overseas clients under pseudo-names. They fake the name to make their customers feel that they are dealing with someone close to home and hide the fact from the end consumers that the work has been outsourced to an Indian company. Sometimes pseudo-names are also used to hide the change of guard that takes place due to high attrition (very common in Indian IT industry).

I hope our customers know, but I thought it is good to make it explicit that Indus Net Technologies never ask its employees to work with pseudo-name.

We feel:

• It is depressing to live a pseudo life with a different identity that your own.
• Businesses are based on personal relationship. Name / identity are the ways we relate to each other. If anyone uses a fake name, the relationship cannot stand.
• It is a tactic to misguide customers.

And we will never do it.

We are proud to be Indians and equally proud to serve companies and people from different cultures / countries around the world.

Globalization does not mean - loosing out your own identity! It is all about embracing the world and doing business considering the entire world as your playing field.

I was with a client from Australia last week and he said; “Only way to sustain a relationship is when both client and vendor are gaining from the deal”. Fixed-price contracts have the highest propensity of getting into the red and as a software services company you need to very careful (if not wary) of entering into such contracts.

When can you give a fixed quote?
Here are the rules - giving a fixed quote makes sense only when:

1. The scope of work is detailed enough to be estimated properly and you can plan the project.

2. You can meet or exceed the expectation of the client within reasonable amount of tolerance (i.e. while keeping yourself profitable)

On the other hand, you can never make money with fixed price contracts unless:

1. You have the knowledge of the business domain. This is simple to explain - if you have never built a “newsletter application” before, you will never be able to estimate it correctly. Clients cannot detail out everything and they expect the vendor to fill in the gaps, unless you have worked on the same type of applications earlier, these gaps will seem like rifts and you will blame client for not specifying everything. Remember that technical skills are not a replacement of knowledge of business domain.

2. You have the right team to do the job. Again, when you estimate something, implicitly you are assuming certain base skill-sets which you know your team possesses. At the time of execution, if a team that does not have the adequate skills or experience is assigned to the job, the project will take 10x longer.

3. You know the technology. This is no biggie! you cannot estimate R&D time beforehand. At best you can budget out for 15 days R&D but you can guarantee that at the end of two months, all unknowns will be known.

4. You have sufficient cushion. No, I am not talking about sleeping over the project! You need to have adequate slack of time, budget and profitability. If your developer estimated 20 days and you gave calendar 20 days to the client then you are doomed even before you start. Similarly, if your client’s budget is $1000 and your budget is coming to $900, its better to say goodbye to this project.

5. You factored the complexity of the project into quote. Complexity is a multiplier to the cost of the project. Forget the technical matters, you may need to change your price by upto 3x depending on the nature of the client. You need to have enough financial incentives to work with a client who is control freak and demands an update 6 times a day. Other factors to consider except technicality is communication with the client or involvement of 3rd party vendors.

Remember: Prevention is better than cure!

‘Web Commuting” is increasingly becoming omnipresent. A Citrix study showed that this is becoming increasing common amongst Americans. It read and I quote:

This survey, conducted by the polling company, inc., found that 23 percent of American workers and 41 percent of small business owners regularly work from home or another offsite location

Our own organization also launched a W@H (Work at home) program which allowed employees doing certain type of work to work from thier homes in case they are unable to come to office for any reason. This implies one thing for sure that with time, we will see less of our employees face-to-face.

This trend makes the importance of proper communication even more important. According to experts, our non-verbal language communicates about 50% of what we really mean (voice tonality contributes 38%) while words themselves contribute a mere 7%. Thus, talking to your employee only via emails, documents or instant messenger means utilizing only about 7% of communication potential and getting only 7% information. Thus, If you not willing to travel at least once a year or devote time to provide constant feedback then it is not going to work for you. Our W@H model has matured to a level where we have employees hired for web commuting only. We see the benefits, but it has not come without time and investment. 

Web Commuting can deliver outstanding cost benefits, adding the dimension of “outsourcing” makes it more lucrative. However, you must carefully plan your business processes to see if it fits your need and when you are ready, involve experts who can walk their talks 

Frankly, I feel that outsourcing companies that sell “offshore staffing” as a service whereas, they do not allow remote working to their own employees, are hypocrites. They sell what they don’t believe in!

I have already discussed how the progress of a project looks slow during the initiation and closing phases and what are the reasons behind that. Today, my point is to discuss how the staffing changes during the project phases. First, let’s understand what staffing means. For our purpose, we will assume that staffing means:

1. Personnel required for a project OR,
2. Utilization of personnel across the project lifecycle.

While the first definition means the physical quantity of people who are working on the project, the second definition means the % of time spent on project activities each person days (this is especially valid in case of small, single person projects that we do). If we plot in graph, the staffing of a project with respect to time, we will see something like this:

Let’s attempt to understand why this happens:

1. Each project goes through a cycle of Requirements, Product Design, Detailed Design, Coding and Unit Testing, Integration and System Test. For a typical 100 person-days project here is a breakup of effort that you may expect is 10% for Requirements, 20% for Design activities, 50% for Coding and 20% for Integration and System Testing. These activities can be sequenced or iterative and in either case, not all effort is spent at once. Since all effort is not spent at once, the resources are allocated in proportion to requirement i.e. effort is pulled based on the demands of the project.

2. The important thing to understand here that Allocation and Utilization may not mean the same thing. Even if someone has been allocated full-time/exclusively to your project, they may not be able to be utilized 100% on it. For instance, during the initial stages, only one person is required to do requirements analysis while during coding several developers may be allocated to the project. There is no point in allocating the full team at the time of project initiation itself.

My earlier post talked about how seasonality impacts your business.

Dedicated Hiring allows you to change your cost structure depending on the business realities. One important feature of this service is that it allows you to change the cost structure based on sales volume and at a notice of less than 30 days.

In order to understand it benefits, see the graph below:

In the above graph the shaded area represents that profits that your business can made even in the case of slow business seasons. Since you have the ability to switch costs “On” or “Off”, it ensures that you can cut down the costs to match the current revenue levels.

Illustrated Example
Total Cost of operating your business consists of two things:

Employee Cost + Operational Expenses

Employee Cost = Recruitment Expenses + Salaries, Wages and Bonus + 401(k) + Insurance + Employee Welfare Expenses + Vacation Costs

Operation Expenses = Software Expenses + Communication + Travel + Rent + Legal + Office facility maintenance + Computer equipment maintenance + Electricity + Recruitment and Training + Office supplies

Here is an easier method to calculate the cost of running the operations. Take the employee’s base salary and multiplies it by 1.25 to cover employment taxes and benefits.  Then multiply that number by 1.75 to cover rent, equipment etc. 

Some management personnel are needed and some of the employee time is spent in non-billable technology development, multiply that number by 1.25.  Thus a full functional managed employee costs about 2.7 times the base salary!

Here is how you can benefit from Dedicated Hiring:

1. You need to pay only a fixed fees per month for actual work that is done - there is no other operational expense.  

2. The employee cost is lower and can be managed based on business volume. Thus, this is a triple benefit i.e. lower costs, scalable manpower and no operational expenditure.

3. You don’t need to hire in-house resources for the non-core area. Dedicated Hiring allows you to manage these jobs in a more flexible way. For instance, if you specialize in Enterprise Applications and you have a infrequent request for a web design, you can get it done through Dedicated hiring program.

4. Ad-hoc maintenance requests on projects can be easily managed through this program as well. Your prompt attentions to these post-delivery requests are important to ensure repeat business and it can especially difficult if the resources have been re-deployed to other projects. In such scenarios, Dedicated Hiring can be of great help.

5. Overflow jobs can be easily be outsourced by this way and it can be directly be managed by you. This is probably the most hassle free of dealing with outsourcing projects that require variety of skills and it saves time as you do not have to go through complex and time consuming selection process.

I know its not the end of financial year as we still have one more quarter to go. It’s however very important to draw of all significant plans within the last quarter and then start making adjustment early on so that you can take on the first three quarters of the next financial year without “loosing” more time in planning.

Planning for the HR is very important function in order to ensure that you have production capacity to undertake any expansion plans or support other organizational objectives. You need to sit down and answer the following questions:

1. What are new positions within the organizations that will be filled?
2. How many people will be required in what positions?
3. How will the current man-power evolve? (Think promotion and attrition!)
4. What are the new competencies that will be required?
5. What jobs would you like to remain in-house and what would you like to outsource?

Once the future labor requirement and the current availability has been clearly established, the gap is action oriented target that can be handed over to the HRD (if you have one!) or in some cases you may need to draw a more detailed plan to fill those gaps. As soon as you begin to think of HR requirements, it is important to separate the qualitative issues from the quantitative issues. Let’s talk about them in more details:

Quantitative Issues

The quantitative issues are easiest to spot. A simple way to do this is simply calculating the ratio between number of people in the company and the current revenue and then calculating the number of people required to achieve the targeted revenue. Ofcourse, this assumes that efficiency with the organization does not change and this short process usually does the job pretty well.

So, if you have 2 employees who are maintaining 40 client installations and generating $20000 every month, you simply calculate that by doing 60 client installations, you will generate revenue of $30000 and you will need one more employee. This “1″ employee then needs to be hired and trained before he is actually needed for production.

Qualitative Issues

In a layman term these are the sort of issues that you can’t put number against and usually means that the current man-power or a part of it does not have the skills and knowledge future job requirements or in some cases you may see that the person is overqualified for the particular job. These are the sort of issues that can only be handled by Training and Restructuring. As as business owner you must realize that right people with right skills and doing the right jobs are the precondition to success.

Is Outsourcing a Qualitative or Quantitative decision?

Outsourcing is a quantitative decision only when same economies of scale can be achieved with an outside vendor or when it’s a strict question of changing capacity within an existing relationship. Getting this plan ready with you will allow you to look for possible outsourcing opportunities early and notify your vendor in advance about your ramp-up or ramp-down plans. However, if you ask yourself - “Can this job be done better by a specialized vendor because I want to focus on core areas?” - it becomes a qualitative decision.

The core is that you must plan ahead of time about what you are going to outsource and in what volume.

Even though distance, communication barriers, lack of local knowledge and geopolitical factors create significant risks, the economies of Offshore outsourcing are numerous and significant. However, to make these economies work for you, you should keep in mind the following few very important points:

Project Scope – Clarity and Understandability

Project Scope is the most important part of the project. The success or otherwise of your project largely depends on how clearly the developer has stepped into your shoes and understood the project scope, the purpose of his actions and the consequences thereof.

It is advisable that your initial efforts should mostly go in making sure that your words are being understood clearly and correctly. If you find any deflection, you should right away contact either the Project Manager or the Account Manager and get a meeting scheduled with the developer, where the relevant issues are discussed in an open and constructive manner. The importance of clear communication should never be discounted at this stage and everything should be put in black and white as far as possible.

Manage The Project

Developers are mainly concerned with developing and not with project management. Someone needs to manage the project and that’s your job in a dedicated hiring project. You should not treat the project as the Developer’s responsibility alone, but should also understand yours as well, which includes the following:

• Make sure the Developer’s interpreted your description the way you intended.
• Make sure the Developer delivers what you asked for.
• You need to set expectations and inspect the Developer’s work to make sure it meets your needs and quality standards.
• If something turns out to be much harder than expected, or does not work out exactly as planned, you might need to decide which of several paths the project should take, after consulting the developer with regards to their feasibility.

Again, Developers do not know the intimate details of your business, your users, etc. An old expression says you only have the right to expect what you inspect. You have to be involved in the project to make sure it delivers what you need.

Finally, it is your project! You have the final say about what the project is.

Share Your Vision With The Developer

After hiring a developer, most people answer the developer’s questions about the project and assume that if he doesn’t ask a question about a particular part of the project, everything must be OK.

What they did miss are all the assumptions:

1. Assumptions made when writing the project description
2. Assumptions the developer made when he read the description

One problem is that we tend to write from our own perspective, not even realizing the assumptions we make. But the fact remains that you know your business inside and out, but your content developer probably won’t know anything about it.

So to avoid this issue, one should take the following precautions:

• Be very clear and concise in your project description. Keep it brief and focused. Adding more words often just adds chances for different interpretations.
• Ask the developer some probing questions about the most important parts of the project. You will very likely discover some assumptions that you or the developer are making.

Get some interesting or useful work output from the developer as early as possible.

Use Instant Messaging for Communicating at the initial stages

Instant Messaging makes remote workers feel as if they’re in the office. It’s faster and more intimate than email and allows you to track and transcribe exchanges. It’s also best for immediate feedback, quick question-and-answer exchanges and other important discussions.

Again, only important matters be discussed over the messenger during the project period or before the beginning an important phase of the project. Have regular goal-oriented communication sessions scheduled with the developer and the project manager. However, it is always recommended that you send your suggestions, ideas and views through email, as you can be express yourself in a much better and free way and discuss the same over IMs.

On a personal level, you must try and gain certain information about the Developers. For example, send across an e-card to wish him on his birthday or on his marriage anniversary. It is similar to treating him like an employee in your own office. This will motivate him and make him feel like a part of your family, after all, he is working for you as your employee!

Proper Expectation Setting

This is the most common mistake people new to software projects make. Unreasonable expectations lead to despair and failure. Most of us just give away a few general ideas about what we want, then sit back and wait for the finished product. Result: unsatisfactory projects.

You need to put time and effort into managing the project to get exactly what you want. Hiring a developer is not “fire and forget” methodology. To succeed, you need to be involved in the process.

You must be prepared, determined, and flexible. You should first ask the developer to work on at least one small project you want to be done. This allows you to learn the ropes on a project you fully understand. It also frees your time for other more important or more profitable tasks!

Understanding The Cultural & Language Differences

Most of us believe that there’s no need to be concerned with culture or language differences that exists during outsourcing. But we must understand that cultural differences can appear in any function. Acceptable user interfaces may have a different look and feel from one society to another. Colors and sentence structure may differ just enough to draw the user’s attention.

When business processes are outsourced, cultural differences are even more pronounced. For example, the way the developers answer your queries, how they interpret the complaints of irate customers, and how they try to add humor to the conversation may all be driven or affected by local culture. For example, a message that is written by a well-intentioned customer to his client in India was like this: “Do this process this way, I bet you’ll get better results.” The developer replied “Sorry, but I don’t gamble!”

Timely Audit & Review Strategy

In order to ensure that the project is completed on time and you get the maximum and timely benefit out of it, you should prepare, beforehand, a periodical audit or appraisal strategy and look for the areas which demand more attention, in terms of timely completion of the project, without facing any cost overruns. Again, this review also helps you to evaluate the performance of the developer and reach various important decisions, like when to deliver the software to your client and report to him with regards to the project performance.

It also helps to ensure that the objectives of the project are properly met. It should ideally be held once every fortnight or every month, depending upon the duration of the project.

Issue Escalation

In case you are facing regular trivial problems with the developer, it is never advisable to simply ignore them. You should report the same to your Project Coordinator in your weekly project feed back. This helps the management to understand the reasons of such problems and would allow them to work on the developers short comings, thus, making it a very important part of effective communication. This in turn will help to prevent any future disasters!

We have recently completed a website http://www.chivaroli.com

This is what Scott has to say about the project and his relationship with Indus Net Technologies -

Thank you.
 
Quote: “I have used Indus Net Technologies for several projects. They are always professional, courteous and understanding of my needs. On our last project, a complete redesign of a website, it took us months to get the content to them. With patience they waited for us until we were ready. Then we had several changes that were completed by Indus Net without hesitation. I work with several outsourcing companies in India and Indusnet Technologies is always on the top of my list.”

Scott E. Palmquist

What can I say?

A BIG Thank you to Scott for having faith in us. We existance is due to well-wishers and partners like you.

Abhishek