INDUS NET JOURNAL

Hello Friends,

We will be present at the Technology for Marketing & Advertising (popularly known as TFMA) @ Earls Court 2 in London on 24th and 25th February 2009.

Our Booth Number is H15.

Feel free to contact us for free tickets and registration. If you are already our customer, please contact your personal account manager and if you are a prospective new member in our family, get in touch with info@indusnet.co.in
Do drop in for a casual chit-chat (we will love to know your business) or a serious consultation about putting together the right Internet strategy for your company.

If you are a digital marketing agency, let us meet and work out a solid, workable model for offshore outsourcing (using on-site project managers in the UK) to reduce your cost and add scalability to your business so that you can grow your business during this tough time. Remember, tough times always come with an opportunity. It depends who chose to take it and who wants to ignore it.

You can meet myself (CEO), our VP-Operations & Marketing and Sr. Manager – UK Operations during the show. I look forward to see you at Earls Court.

Hello Friends,

Instead of us telling you, you tell us. We are running a poll where you can come and participate and let us know what do you think is the biggest advantage of offshore outsourcing.

Take your pick:

• Access to competency
• Reduction in cost
• Ability to scale up
• Round the clock operations

You can vote here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/14553/nxjty

The Satyam scam has been an unfortunate incident in Indian corporate history.

There has been a lot of comments going around about the ‘ethics of Indian IT companies’. We believe that this fiasco is an outcome of personal greed and it should not be generalized. The same personal greed has resulted in scams of huge magnitude in diverse geographics and industries. Therefore generalizing it and questioning the ethics of Indian IT companies is an absolutely narrow minded approach to the problem.

I have addressed this issue in detail in my, personal blog. The comments there are my personal views and not the general view-point of Indus Net Technologies as a whole.

Hello Friends,

We will be exhibiting (Stand no. 207) at Search Engine Strategies London 2009 on 17th and 18th February. Feel free to drop in for a cup of coffee and free Internet marketing consultation for your website.

It is the definitive event for UK and European marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketing (SEM) specialists, including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) consultants.

The conference will be from 17th February till 20th February 2009. Check out the complete event agenda at http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/london/agenda.html

The event will take place at:

Business Design Centre
52 Upper Street, Islington
London, N1 0QH
Tel: +44 (0)20 7259 3535
Fax: +44 (0)20 7226 0590
URL: www.businessdesigncentre.co.uk

If you wish to drop in, feel free to use our invite to get a 20% discount off the conference fees or a free entry pass to the expo. You can download and print the e-invite http://www.submit2please.com/seslon09_20p_indus.pdf

I look forward to see you at Search Engine Strategies and help you with more SEO/SEM success in 2009.

Abhishek

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.