Many UK companies are now considering outsourcing IT services within the UK. Some of them are doing it in addition to their offshore outsourcing developments, while others are simply supporting the economy by involving themselves with local suppliers. In the previous blog I was discussing about advantages & disadvantages of offshore IT Outsourcing. A few days back we interviewed some of our clients regarding their experience with offshore and onshore outsourcing providers. This blog will include some of those interview responses.
One of our clients Steve said “Driving from Surrey to Maldon is much cheaper than taking a flight to India. Sometimes we need to bring the developers onsite to show them what our other applications are like and what quality and style we prefer. We need to give them proper training before handing over the responsibilities. Companies which are relatively smaller like mine could never afford to do it with someone from overseas.”
According to another client Erick, it is very important to have feedback from the outsource providers. From his previous experience he observed that developers from overseas do exactly what they are told, they are never comfortable to give their own opinion if the client is wrong. This is due to the cultural difference and there’s very little which could be done to improve this.
“If we are allowing someone to work on our back office solutions, we have to be sure that they comply with the data protection legislations. I can never have peace of mind letting someone from a different country handle all our sensitive information. If we do not have the resource in house, I would rather hand over the work to someone who is bound by the same law as us.”- said one of our clients from a government agency.
“When I outsourced my first project to a company in New Delhi, I had really high hopes. The agents brainwashed me saying that the developments costing £300 a day can be done for £10 a day in India. It did sound too good to be true, but I fell for it. I was not aware of all the hidden costs at all. The exchange rate of Indian Rupee had a big impact on my profit. I was really disappointed as the quality of the work was not what I expected. I have a feeling that the biggest barrier was the language. Even though they were fluent in English, they had trouble understanding my English accent and I struggled to understand their strong Indian accent too. At the end of the day, I had to hire a local agency to clean up all the mess they created. If I could go back in time I’d outsource from a local company to save all the trouble I had.”
The truth is, no one makes 200% profit by outsourcing work abroad. Why not Share your offshore outsourcing stories with us. We might include them in our next blog!