August 17, 2009 at 5:34 am
I am pretty sure that this is a well rehearsed subject, looking at other topics. Just like to share some of my experiences and hopefully get some feedback to see they are the exception rather than the rule.
I have worked at numerous clients over the years and have seen outsourcing up close and personal, I dont like to sterotype so I wont mention the clients or the outsourcing company.
It was the start of an interesting day, we were fully aware that certain teams have been outsourced and that is was an ongoing outsourcing project, typically to last about 5 years in total from what I can remember. it was pretty much an ongoing disaster so far, the helpdesk and support groups had already been outsourced and the complaints about poor service and lack of technical knowledge were starting to flood in. As a team, us DBA's sat back and watched the drama's unfolded, confident in the knowledge that the mission critical and business critical databases would ensure that we would not be outsourced, I mean how could we be, our systems contained sensitive data and if not maintained could even result in loss of life in worse case scenario. However we didnt take into account the usual spiel from the outsourcing company promising that they can handle all IT requirements. This posed an interesting question, How could they promise to keep SLA's when, one, they hadnt been on site to see what we actually do and secondly, the email that was sent by management to us, described us as DBA - Database Analysts, which inspired us with confidence no end. We sat back and thought about this and the impending sense of doom, landed and never left us. I remember the one to one interviews that the outsourcing company gave to the permanent employees, I was fortunate enough to be contract, but even I did not escape the one to one interview. One of the things that impressed me at the time, was the complete and utter honesty of the person handing the TUPE (movement of staff from one employer to another), in one of the one to one interviews with one of the permanent DBA staff, the DBA was told and I quote 'I dont care if you join us or not', I think that set the mood for the rest of the team.
Needless to say, when my contract was up for renewal, and I was told I has to sign with the outsourcing company, I told them where to stick it and found a better client. I still wonder how the company exists considering the people that were flown over to do knowledge transfer, didnt know one end of a database from another, and the other thing that was funny, is that some of the systems had to remain in the uk, because of the sensitivity of the data, how on earth it could be supported from india, I have no idea.
and this is just one of many outsouring experiences I have had. Never seen a successful one yet and hopefully I can find a client who isnt coerced into outsourcing their IT while I am there, trying to earn a buck.
Interested to know if others have had similiar experiences.
~Silverfox~
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August 17, 2009 at 8:29 am
August 17, 2009 at 9:29 am
Vijay Mishra (8/17/2009)
This is the way business is happening around the world. Value for $$ is always on the mind of management.Better not to crib just accept the reality and move on to the higher level which couldn't be outsourced 😉
Really, I havent see the value for money, as you describe, ever come to fruition for any organisation. and I would be intrigued to know the higher level you are describing as all technical roles try and get outsourced at some point.
Isnt India the main supply of outsourcing... and isnt its economy very much IT based.
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August 17, 2009 at 9:50 am
I saw a case just today. Client's DBA role had been outsourced (to a local company). The person responsible for all of their admin is just about straight out of school, got a couple courses and certs under his belt, no experience.
Size of the database - currently 1.2TB expected to grow to 6TB within a year.
Apparently just about every time the DBAs do any work on the system, they bring the whole thing down, and this is a 24x7x365 system.
Fun. Not.
Edit: I should say DBAs because there's more than one involved. All about the same level of wet-behind-the-ears.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
August 17, 2009 at 9:56 am
Just goes to prove, exactly what I have said in other topics about certification and lack of experience. pretty damn sad to see it, but that is the way it is, when outsourcing companies tell companies they can do everything for less.
nuff said
~Silverfox~
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August 17, 2009 at 10:01 am
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
Really, I havent see the value for money, as you describe, ever come to fruition for any organisation. and I would be intrigued to know the higher level you are describing as all technical roles try and get outsourced at some point.
I have worked with many outsourced projects, but in all of them the org had insisted on having DBA's at their location. At times they would employ the outsourcing firm's DBA, but the person has to be onsite. Of all DBA activities that I've heard of being outsourced involved routine stuff like lock removals, user creation, purging etc. Never heard of a hardcore DBA stuff (dB setup, replication, DR, task automation etc) moving to India (but my exposure may be limited here and don't count Singapore as an outsourcing country). In the routine tasks the org has got value for money ($100+ ph vs $25-35 ph). And its the same when it comes to coding for applications. Maintaining apps is much cheaper ($20 ph) once outsourced than having a contractor with $70+ ph sit and maintain it. Again most of the firms I've worked with prefer the in-house apps to be developed onshore.
As for quality, I've been to both sides of the spectrum and have seen the best and horrendous on both sides; and don't posses the strength to discuss it anymore.
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
Isnt India the main supply of outsourcing... and isnt its economy very much IT based.
For IT, yes it's India (for manufacturing it's China) and yes services sector account for almost 50%+ of GDP. But what's your point in this context?
August 17, 2009 at 10:04 am
GilaMonster (8/17/2009)
I saw a case just today. Client's DBA role had been outsourced (to a local company).
Wouldn't that be like getting a contractor on-board? And I'm not sure why not hire that guy as contractor than outsource it! I guess, OP was talking specifically about offshore outsourcing.
August 17, 2009 at 10:19 am
rjv_rnjn (8/17/2009)
GilaMonster (8/17/2009)
I saw a case just today. Client's DBA role had been outsourced (to a local company).Wouldn't that be like getting a contractor on-board?
No. Getting a contractor means that they guy is dedicated to you (you hired him), working at your offices (typically) and and answering to you.
And I'm not sure why not hire that guy as contractor than outsource it!
Because the guy's not for hire. He works for CompanyX who provides 'outsourced DBA services' to a number of companies. So the person who's doing your DBA work is also probably doing similar work for a number of other clients. It's great for companies that don't need a dedicated, full time DBA, providing the outsourced company's staff are actually competent.
I guess, OP was talking specifically about offshore outsourcing.
He was?
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
August 17, 2009 at 11:06 am
I was talking about offshore outsourcing where the entire it function is offshored and for the record I have seen a lot of work both development including .net and tsql where there is absolutely no understanding of the tool used. To put it bluntly we have to send the code back or do it ourselves. Concerning dba work. We are not talking about simple tasks like user management but full on support including disaster recovery, mirroring and replication. When I get asked about simple select queries and the syntax for restoring a database, because they do everything through the GUI. And they are down as senior dbas from the outsourcing company. It makes you wonder how companies that outsource their it keep on running.
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August 17, 2009 at 11:20 am
We've had mixed results with outsourcing some of those roles. We have some amount of our coding and maintenance work being performed off-shore, and we've found that it vastly depends on the company you hire, and the quality of the contract you put in place. The right SLA's with specific items to measure at very least allow you to easily withhold payment for non-service and/or just simply walking away from relationships because the company cannot handle it.
One function has come back, but the other seems to holding for now. The night-time maintenance and deployment schedules seem to be working out pretty well; the code was suffereing from too much disconnection, so we didn't think that would work out.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
August 17, 2009 at 12:42 pm
GilaMonster (8/17/2009)
rjv_rnjn(8/17/2009)
I guess, OP was talking specifically about offshore outsourcing.He was?
Unless I am reading the whole first post wrong! {I don't think title of the thread alone should be considered}
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
I still wonder how the company exists considering the people that were flown over to do knowledge transfer, didnt know one end of a database from another, and the other thing that was funny, is that some of the systems had to remain in the uk, because of the sensitivity of the data, how on earth it could be supported from india, I have no idea.
Confirmed! 🙂
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
I was talking about offshore outsourcing where the entire it function is offshored...
I am with you on this point. This should never be done and there are multitudes of examples where it went wrong.
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
... and for the record I have seen a lot of work both development including .net and tsql where there is absolutely no understanding of the tool used. To put it bluntly we have to send the code back or do it ourselves.
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
When I get asked about simple select queries and the syntax for restoring a database...
Really??? :unsure: I guess you guys have got a really bad vendor or you are exaggerating.
Silverfox (8/17/2009)
It makes you wonder how companies that outsource their it keep on running.
The world has its mysterious ways! 😛
August 17, 2009 at 12:42 pm
At my current company we've tried one offshore outsourcing of a single development project because it would "save money" not to mention deliver the project faster, and it would work better, and require less management time to implement, and make our mouth fresher... Anyway, it was an unmitigated disaster. It ran longer than the original in-house programming estimates. Cost WAY more than it would have, didn't work right, at all, at any step in the process, took more time from the management team than they've ever had to give to the in-house projects, and I never got that full minty-fresh feeling.
I have to say, I was very nervous leading into the experiment, but it failed so badly that the nervousness just went away, along with the outsourcing company. BTW, we successfully rewrote the app in less time than our initial estimates.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
August 17, 2009 at 2:00 pm
My main outsourcing experience started with the owner of the company we would be ourtsourcing to flying to the US to meet us.
He took one look at the database I'd built, condemned the many "newbie mistakes" in it (he was right, that version of the database was junk by my current standards), and proceded to tell the owners of the company I worked for about how it would all be so much better once they had taken over all of the IT functions except hardware maintenance.
The contract was signed, and less than 6 hours later, one of their devs had run an unrestricted update in the production database that reset all customer passwords to some multisylabic word that I don't remember and couldn't pronounce at the time anyway. This locked out everyone from their data, which resulted in refunds being needed in order to keep customers.
Fortunately, I had audit logging set up, and was able to recover all the passwords.
We were promised that the person responsible had been fired and this would never, ever happen again. While they were on the phone promising that, another person there ran another unrestricted update, on the orders table this time, messing up every order that had ever been placed. Again, audit logs allowed me to fix the problem in relatively short order. Again, refunds had to happen to placate understandably upset (and confused) customers.
While this was beginning to feel like the credits for Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail ("those responsible for sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked"), it had considerably less entertainment value.
So I locked them out of the production server entirely, and my boss, one of the company owners, explained to them that their services would not be needed for any database work, and negotiated a change of contract where they would only be working on .NET development for us, and all database development would go through me. (When you consider that I still didn't even know what "normal forms" were, and hadn't figured out what "relational" meant, and that I was the better of the two options, you'll begin to see the magnitude of suck here.)
The company that was doing all of our .NET work then proceded to work out a routine for speccing out work for these guys to do, and rapidly found that it took less time to write the code in the first place than it took to write a detailed enough specification in order to get something that would approach the desired functionality. Within a month, the cost of outsourcing the software development was greater than the cost of writing it locally, and the contract was terminated.
Now, nobody at our company lost their jobs over this. Had it worked out well, I would have gone back to sales and marketing, and would have been making more money on that anyway. So I didn't have any emotional stake in their failure. But wow did they fail!
I haven't experienced any other attempts at outsourcing (offshoring, to be more precise), but I certainly hope this was atypically bad.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
August 17, 2009 at 3:00 pm
GSquared (8/17/2009)
While this was beginning to feel like the credits for Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail ("those responsible for sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked"), it had considerably less entertainment value.
Yes, The Updaters beats Monty Python any given day. 😀
I just realized one surprising thing. Nowhere on any of the boards, have I heard people narrating a good experience with offshore s/w professionals and still that industry seems to be bulging all the time (maybe not now in this economic environment). Is it one of those anomalies?
August 17, 2009 at 3:41 pm
rjv_rnjn (8/17/2009)
GSquared (8/17/2009)
While this was beginning to feel like the credits for Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail ("those responsible for sacking the people responsible for the credits have been sacked"), it had considerably less entertainment value.Yes, The Updaters beats Monty Python any given day. 😀
I just realized one surprising thing. Nowhere on any of the boards, have I heard people narrating a good experience with offshore s/w professionals and still that industry seems to be bulging all the time (maybe not now in this economic environment). Is it one of those anomalies?
Proven through various studies, word of mouth advertising the best (or worst) for a company. Studies show that an individual with a good experience with a company will talk to 3 others. A person with a bad experience will talk to 11 others. So, the moral, avoid bad word of mouth advertising. Do good by all your customers!
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