Deploy Offshoring & Outsourcing Success: Define Metrics

Times are, indeed, challenging. The entire economy is obviously mired in uncertainty, which never bodes well for our industry. This has been such a tough decade, and many are calling our current industry situation worse than the aftermath of 9/11. Looking ahead to 2009, there is no doubt that the impact of the recent financial collapse and the potential for a global recession are front of our minds. Credit is tightening everywhere, consumers will be spending less, and businesses will have a harder time raising capital. This may well translate to cuts in capital spending and widescale efforts by our clients to cut spending. Most important, it will be difficult but crucial for business leaders to recognize the opportunities in a changing landscape and to maintain long-term discipline while addressing short-term challenges.

I am sure that Cost Control, Value Addition Services, Customer Sensitivity, Right sizing, exploring business options would be some of the top 10 to-do’s on every CXO’s list for 2009.
They're striving to see through the economic and political fog of today to what the post-meltdown future holds. They're discussing new and evolving ideas such as "joint accountability" and "collaborative partnering" the critical role technology can play in defining and managing outsourcing success, business and community development through public-private partnerships, outsourcing as a vehicle for corporate social investment and how outsourcing professionals can become blackbelts for a flat world. One major focus is on increasing process efficiencies across the entire spectrum of their offshoring operations — from call centers, Technology Development to Research & innovation work.

First let's revisit the often talked topic : Why is Outsourcing necessary ?

I am sure; everyone must have read about the term "Opportunity Cost". An Opportunity Cost is the value of a product that is forgone when pursuing another product. Let us take an example: If a CTO/CEO of a company spends 2/3 hours everyday on problem solving everyday issues on an existing customer facing technology service platform or Web Application, which could have been easily outsourced, the opportunity cost is the time lost in fire fighting redundant or trivial issues. That time could have been used to take important strategic decisions about your company's future technology roadmap or defining a new technology service or it could have been time well spent playing baseball with your kids. Either way, the time represents an opportunity cost, or you may call it an opportunity lost. Now let us try to understand how to make outsourcing a beneficial experience for both you and your customer. Cutting cost is the first thing most of the companies think about while outsourcing their business needs. Now this is the problem.

As a company planning to outsource your services you should focus on these 3 things:

1) Leveraging Cost/Skill Advantages
2) Quality of work desired.
3) Customer satisfaction.

Preparing a business case weighing on the above 3 factors gives you enough reasons on WHAT- WHERE- HOW -WHEN to Outsource questions.

More importantly the success criteria of offshoring or Outsourcing would be measured by the following metrics:

Prior to Outsourcing-

1. Political, Business and Economic Atmosphere of the Region
2. Country Demographics- Language & Cultural Neutrality
3. Talent Pool of the Vendor
4. Customer Credentials
5. Domain Expertise
6. Infrastructure & Business Continuity Engagement & Procedures
7. Process Adherence and Quality Standards Frameworks
8. Employee Engagement & Employee Turnover rate
9. Internal Business Engagement and Offshoring repurcussions

Now that you've shortlisted a suitable vendor, the following would be the post offshoring factors which you should consider

1. Service Level Agreements and Service Level Deliverables
2. Turnaround Time for Issue Resolutions
3. Transition Plans, Project Plans, Resourcing Plans, Communication Plans
4. Risk Management.
5. Business Value Propositions

Develop a Cost v/s Benefit Analysis during the term of the engagement to monitor the benefits arising of the engagement in terms of customer satisfaction scores(C-SAT), Increase of Business Revenue, Reduction of Issues, Sales Figures, Saving of Annual spending on Marketing or Development budgets etc whatever are the direct impacts or percieved benefits from the offshoring engagement. These would be healthy indicators which would define the success of the engagement and finally to the business.

I would welcome more suggestions on what are the benefits you've encountered from your offshoring engagements.

-Mustafa Balsara-PMP

Simplifying UI Complexity for IT Applications

This is an interesting depiction of how modern day web applications instead of convincing the customer on the application design confuse them more.

I think part of this is most of these apps are mimicking paper forms. I’ve even seen some cases where it seemed the UI form was meant to capture data for a specific HL7 message (ughh). It reminds me of some tardy ERP-type systems which we still have existing today.

While conventional wisdom holds one in good stride but as technology progresses I firmly believe that we would need to 'Think-out-of the box' designs.(these are tall words, but I am trying myself to figure out how?)

The UI has to be designed looking to the user who is going to use it and what information he would like to “USE” rather than ‘SEE’.

The below are a few guidelines which I guess would contribute to an efficient way to design a UI:

1) Style Sheet guidelines - We use CSS but sometimes new styles appear to be created without enough thought. You have to keep your CSS files clean and well documented. Review them on a regular basis to ensure that new styles are only being added when needed. I would personally prefer a CMS to handle this to maintain consistency.

2) Define guidelines around button placements e.g Save, Cancel, Submit- They should be ideally located at the same locations on the each pages.

3) Define load time expectations - If the page is taking too long to load(lot of graphics etc) then I guess the end-users would only be more frustated. Take care of that - minimality is the key.

4) Screen Resolution- Study your end-users, what systems they would be using. Certain countries still have the 800x600 dpi monitors. Optimise designs to fit those screen resolutions or Aspect Ratio
Resolutions with a 4:3 aspect ratio: 800 x 600; 1024 x 768 ; 1152 x 864 ; 1600 x 1200
Resolutions with a 5:4 aspect ratio: 1280 x 1024 ; 1600 x 1280

5) Use of descriptive text - What types of information should be provided to users? Information provided should be used and not only to see.

6) How are errors and confirmation text displayed - Do you take users to error pages or show messages on the page. Pick a method and stick with it.

7) Do you use pop-ups? If yes, how should they display and what behaviors must they support.- How are lists displayed? For example, if a lists of users is returned by a search make sure they are always displayed the same way. This code needs to be common and the display of the users should clearly be the same on every page. Certain browsers block pop-ups, one needs to factor that pre-requisite on the pages.

8) Concentrate on Semantics- e.g Data labels across all forms have to be consistent and should follow conventions.

9) For webforms - there could be mandatory and non-mandatory fields- Mark them separately.

10) As far as possible “Free text” fields should be minimized for web form based application unless unavoidable. Drop down’s or Radio buttons should be preferred wherever possible. This makes form filling faster, easier and data storage easy and retrievable for business intelligence reporting.

11) Strive for consistency, minimality, ease of use, neat design: Cater to universal usability, Offer informative feedback, Permit easy reversal of actions, Make users feel they are in control.

Feel free to add on this post with your comments/suggestions. I would appreciate your thoughts!

- Mustafa Balsara, PMP

Social Networking Services- A New Global Connect Web2.0 Revolution

Wikipedia defines "Social Networking Service" :- A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.


Social Networking is all about sharing and discovering the myriad ideas and interests in this information universe (Okay...I'm starting to sound like Carl Sagan) It is not about staying in one place rather being able to pick the best one that meets your specific needs at any given time. The trick is you have to invest the time in order to get any true value.

This opens up a lot of options/avenues to information exposure to friends, communities based on interest, professions/activities etc. I would say “Reducing Degrees of Separation” Its wasn’t too long ago when we said that if on an average everyone know 42 people around them, then the entire 6 billion population of this world is just 6 degrees away (6th root of 6,000,000,000 = 42.628)

Use this formula: (average number of friends per person) ^ (degrees of separation) = total population


The success of Orkut, Linkedin, FaceBook, MySpace etc has shaken the entire internet industry. This has announced that these platforms and technologies are here to stay. They define Web2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques. Referring to Andrew McAfee's defined acronym SLATES to refer to them:

1. “Search: the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.
2. Links: guides to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.
3. Authoring: the ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that the people undo and redo each other's work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.
4. Tags: categorization of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.
5. Extensions: automation of some of the work and pattern matching by using algorithms e.g. amazon.com recommendations.
6. Signals: the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to notify users with any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.

More and more internet savvy people are opening to idea of such social networks to connect with friends, family, groups of common interests and this is bringing a social information revolution across the world wide web with so much of information pertaining to consumer activities, interests being shared across the WWW. Going forward how could this information be normalised, categorised & analysed for social intelligence purposes......am I hinting at Web3.0.

Starting of my personal Blog..Musings Ahoy!

My Outer Space would be the things which I see, observe, learn, adapt and absorb to make me a better human being in this circle of life. I strongly believe that life around you- 'The Outer Space' gives you enough cues to build the 'Inner Space' in You. This blog would be the reflection of the outer space & my learnings around me.