Quality issues, as globalization fuels offshore outsourcing
Offshore outsourcing is a new trend. Growth has exceeded 50% per year since the mid-1990s, some years around 100%, thanks to increasing globalization and utilization of Internet. As the world's major economies continue to weaken and stumble, driving consumer spending and corporate profits down, the pressure to outsource offshore to reduce costs -- labor and other office overhead -- will only intensify.
Offshore outsourcing is already too large of a sector to be growing at rates of 50-100% per year, and growing pains are evident all over, as is evidenced by poor quality results and missed deadlines. Unfortunately, as offshore outsourcing via Internet is seen as "The Next Big Thing", charlatans keep rushing in, trying to make quick and easy money with little real experience in offshore outsourcing.
One thing is the same everywhere in the world: quality starts with hiring the right people in the first place. We do not hire people based only on paper credentials. Attitude and taking pride in their work are personality traits that are prerequisites, as is talent. You cannot take mediocre staff and train quality into them. Personalities don't change. If you want things done right, then you need the right people.
It is important to have expats located at the offshore office to recruit local talent, mentor them for Western styles, and direct the office day to day.
In contrast, many American charlatans who have hardly set foot outside the U.S. or done business abroad somehow link up with offshore agents "sight unseen", purely over the internet. Those foreign agents are often just marketing fronts. They just write better English than their cohorts, and present the best samples they got from who knows where. They turn around and outsource to whatever cheap available labor they can get at the moment (which is often not who created the samples).
In the end, the charlatan and their customer get a reality check on the product and timeline.
Anyone can broker offshore labor outsourcing services based on submitted paper credentials. But if you want results anywhere near your expectations, then you'd better go to an established offshore website design office.
Cost vs. quality, offshore vs. onshore
Price is usually proportional to quality, but there are two scales for price: onshore and offshore.
As regards quality, that is established first by the CEO's personal values, style and business experience. That's the case both onshore and offshore, in techie realms as well as mainstream business. The best management leadership is vital. Then come the employees who are hired, mentored and managed.
Most offshore operations consist of purely indigenous people who have no experience of doing business in the West, little familiarity with Western culture and language besides Hollywood, and limited English language skills.
They often give "offshore labor" a bad name.
Our company is different, as witnessed by the fact that our American CEO and top management are native Westerners experienced and successful in non-Internet businesses before 1994. Now our expats are located on-site at the offshore offices which they themselves raised from scratch over several years. We are not brokers nor a sweatshop operation. We are completely an in-house operation and well managed. See our company section for more background.
Offshore can provide MORE quality, not less
First of all, offshore prices will be considerably more economical for a given level of quality. Offshore prices can be fully offshore (i.e., all labor offshore, including an offshore expat for text content research, analysis and writing) or partly offshore (e.g., artwork and programming offshore, content writing by your staff or by our North American representative).
For example, in many countries a university graduate in computer science starts work fulltime at $300 per month and moves up to $500-$600 after years of experience, for indigenous companies. (We pay more, retaining talented and quality minded individuals.)
Secondly, contrary to popular belief, offshore can mean greater quality. Most customers will find that quality will improve once they go beyond their own local folks and start tapping into the best talent on the vast worldwide market. We have the best of both worlds -- world class artists and programmers teamed with Western business mentors and native English professional writers. Our researchers, analysts and conceptual designers are Western or Western-led.
Third, offshore workers are usually more reliable, not less, compared to many "local" consultants in North America and Europe, because Westerners tend to become unavailable due to other local work or move around more, whereas offshore workers usually don't work in their own locality at all but are geared for the international market. Offshore workers usually have fewer local options and distractions. They tend to have less arrogance and more appreciation for work, especially for Western companies. Their strong family values and sense of community also tends to keep working groups together.
Even in cases when an offshore worker gets carried away with a full-time offshore project which makes them unavailable for a previous client, it is less costly to bring a new offshore worker up to speed with your existing website at a later time than it would cost for a consultant local to you to come up to speed. The offshore talent pool is vastly greater than the local supply market, and it will be a very long time -- decades? -- before the demand for offshore workers meets supply.
In general, by going with an offshore outsourcing company like ours, you can leave it to us to manage your projects with both cost efficiency and effectiveness.
No, our offshore operation is not a sweatshop!
Unlike many other offshore operations, Offshore Website Design is not a sweatshop operation. Offshore workers are known for their diligence in serving overseas clients when faced with the options of offshore work paid in US dollars vs. local work and long hours at menial rates in an inflationary local currency.
Nevertheless, we do not push our offshore workers to their minimum wage and maximum workweek limits, even if they want to work more because:
- fatigue causes quality and value to suffer, especially in creativity
- tired people take shortcuts and avoid more work to do the right thing
On the other hand:
- a pleasant working environment with a class ambiance is conducive to pride and artistic creativity
- well-paid staff (by their standards) are loyal
- limited working hours keeps energy levels strong
Quantity of hours is no substitute for quality of hours
This business is profitable enough, and it would become a problem for everyone if we tried to squeeze more profit out of it, in addition to bad karma. That's not the best way to live life and interact with others.
Our non-Western people are of relatively high status and wages in their own country by their local standards, and are exceptional achievers.
While standard ISO procedures are useful, quality really comes down to individuals, not just trying to squeeze quality out of an ordinary organization.
The reality of many offshore "specialist" operations
Frankly, many offshore companies often just have a bunch of MBAs and generic project managers who hire cheaper wage people based on paper credentials compared to market demand, with little executive understanding of the technical fields involved, whereby one computer guy looks like another to these founders and managers.
We are not just brokers of services and paper credentials -- "warm bodies". Instead, Offshore Website Design has highly accomplished and experienced specialists in the same fields as the applicants they examine, hire and manage. The field of computers is as vast as the medical and legal fields, and quality comes from specialists hiring other specialist staff and developing microcommunity teams.
We retain talent by developing mutually respectful relationships in our professional disciplines, and arranging prompt and convenient payment methods. We have both local offices and also independent operators working from home in other countries. We often develop strong bonds with remote people via internet, which also helps us expand into a new region.
Class goes beyond basic economics.
Typical website design quality problems
How many times have you visited a website and experienced:
- Lots of bells and whistles showing off the webmaster's or programmer's skills but which are of little if any practical value, and indeed detract from the purpose of the website?
- Slow loading of a website due to overdone graphics?
- Crash of your web browser ("Illegal operation...") due to poor or "too advanced" website coding?
- Forms that don't work, e.g., error messages when submitted, or won't accept your form -- as if they didn't test or double-check their programming?
- Difficulty in finding out how to contact someone for help?
- Claims of a 24/7, quick response help desk only to find that they quickly send you a "canned" or "form letter" response that didn't answer your question?
- Bad spelling and grammar?
- Poor conceptual design and artistic design in general?
- Error messages when people try to send e-mail to you, or mysteriously lost mail? (But if you didn't receive mail, how would you know you hadn't received it?)
We don't "gold-plate" websites with unnecessary "quality", nor do we show off our technical skills with bells and whistles. What we do is this:
- Deliver the kind of website you want for your budget
- Create practical websites to best appeal to your potential clientele, by "putting ourselves in the shoes of" your potential clientele, being more than just technical webmasters
- Perform thorough research of your online competitors and submitted materials
- Keep you informed of our progress to make sure we are creating what you want as we go, for the sake of efficiency
- Arranging a server in the U.S. or your target country which performs well and is reasonably priced (we have our longtime proven servers in the U.S.) -- both website and e-mail
- Ensure all programming on your website works by complete checking
- Ensure all spelling and grammar is correct (U.S. vs. Canadian vs. British vs. Australian English, too -- it should reflect your native environment)
- Respond quickly to your communications to us
Poor quality generally comes from some or all of the following factors:
- Carelessness, poor work ethic, bad attitude
- Lack of time and focus, or being overworked
- Low skill, lack of experience
It is not difficult to avoid bad quality, and in fact to create top quality, and it starts with hiring quality people, and managing workload nicely. Go to our company page to learn why quality has been a particularly sensitive issue to Offshore Website Design founder Mark Prado.
Superior Western quality at low offshore prices is our competitive edge in this age of accelerating globalization and offshore outsourcing. Contact us.
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