Outsourcing to India - Experiment 1 - Outsourcing Enablers.

Posted by admin on November 10th, 2007 filed in Advice

Well, outsourcing to India seems to be all the rage these days. Over the past year I have tried to outsource my work to India with little success. In today’s post I cover the first of my attempts.

Outsourcing Enablers was the name of the first company I’ve tried. This was one year ago.

It was done in response to an ad agency I was doing some consulting done for. They needed some work done and they needed it fast. We needed to do some web page changes for a customer and our in house person had too much work, and weren’t able to locate a person locally despite a $500 ad on Monster.com.

So we thought we would go online for the work. We started to browse places like guru.com and other sites that match workers and projects.

Needless to say, outsourcing-enablers really caught our eye. They were available on Skype for text chat and reasonably responsive. The $10/hr was what drew our attention at first. I’m sure most people would have stopped searching right there and hired them. On the project site, they did have good reviews.

But working at an ad agency, it was important that we give our clients an estimate of TIME and HOURLY RATE. So we searched out a few competitive quotes.

Almost consistently, outsourcing enablers had the best hourly rate. Web development typically ran from $40, with several closer to the $100 an hour rate. This was looking promising.

However, almost consistently, outsourcing enablers quotes the number of hours required as 10 times the typical quotation rate. Jobs that were quoted by most people as 3 hours were quoted as 30 hours. This wasn’t a one time incident. Time and time again we went to them for quotes and their timelines.

One example that I called them on was a particular site… We developed new META DESCRIPTION text that needed to be on 10 web pages. As any developer would know, you open up the pages and paste the new META DESCRIPTION tag in it (or you have an INCLUDE). If you cut and pasted, how long would it take you to do that 10 times…. Copy once, open document, paste and save…. According to outsourcing enablers - 6 hours!

Whoah…. how about increase the width of images in a gallery. Most images had image width set to 150 pixels.. Client wanted 200 pixels. How much would you charge to change the code on STATIC HTML pages? You just change the code, you don’t need to resize the images. It would involve doing a IMG WIDTH=”200″ instead of “150″. Again, easy search and replace. Again, 6 hours.

I brought these issues (and many more to their attention)…

It will not take 6 hours to add the PRINT LOCATION below the image description. Again, this is something that will literally take a few minutes.Are you certain about these figures? The site is not a development from nothing, the site already exists.

Please have another look and get back to me.

Dear David,
The estimation of hours is a very controvertible issue.
We might assume a task to take 2 hours. However, we end up doing it in 4 hours similarly we might take 4 hours for a task but might complete it in 2 hours. That is the reason that we normally prefer to share the consolidated cost for the project. I request you to consider the same for this project as well.
Please let me know if that works for you.
Warm regards,
Aarushi

Well, this really wasn’t a very satisfying answer. Plus time was of the essence here… Most competitive quotes we received showed 20 hours and told us ‘2-3 days.’

It will take us minimum of 10-12 days to develop all functionalities.

Warm regards,

Aarushi

Two possible scenarios existed for me.
1. They really don’t know what they are doing and it really will take them this long.
2. They think I don’t know what I am doing.

Anyhow, we ended up hiring someone in North America who had it done in two days at a price far less than the ‘cheaper’ Indian outsourcing firms could offer.

I’m sure most people bought on ’sticker price’ of the hourly rate.

Bottom line: I found no bargains offshore.