WWWalker's Outsourcing Methods

See also Project Management | Finance Management | Intellectual Property | USA | Terms and Conditions

How we work with you

There is some confusion between outsourcing and casual employment. Here is our take on the differences. Outsourcing means you give us a job and we decide how to do it and you get the results without saying how we achieve them. This is totally different from an employee where you can dictate exactly how we do it. Outsourcing is very flexible and gives us an edge over just employing someone. We have experience and can use that to do a better job than a basic employee can.

What is an independent contractor?

There is a very common attitude amongst bigger companies that a contractor is the same as an employee except that the contractor pays the superannuation and Workers compensation. In other words, they get a dedicated employee they can fire at will and not have to pay any of his overheads. We are against this attitude or misconception. Why should we take all the risk and make the bigger guy richer with no benefit to our business? It is unjust but very common. We have built up our own inhouse infrastructure and development techniques to protect us from the evil effects of this abuse of power. I believe we are gradually clawing back the impact of bigger companies using their might to be overlords to us. We are getting stronger each time we are kicked down and get up again and are becoming more flexible, agile, resilient and tough to outrun their devastation and prosper in spite of bad attitudes or ignorance from bigger companies to our little business who try to exploit or destroy us for their own advantage.

Techniques and Business-End

See Pricing, Project Management and Quotes.

Virtualization and Mirroring

• In 2008, we started using virtualization to improve outsourcing as we can replicate test environments without having access to the right equipment wherever that server is.
• We also build inhouse mirror sites for testing to combat poor internet access due to the customer skimping on infrastructure.
• We have used virtual FreeBSD on Windows XP under VMWare and setup Debian Linux mirror sites to test and deploy systems.

We offer service at two levels:

• short-term one off jobs
• long-term jobs
• no on-call jobs - every job has an end-date
• totally discrete and not partnered or involved at all with customers' assets or business to reduce risk

Billing:

• we generate monthly small invoices to keep on top of feature creep and cost blowouts and reduce debt and losses, chronic problems with small business customers with no capital or business expertise

Planning:

• We include project management on larger jobs though progressively on all jobs as the benefits are so high.
• Our maximum job size at present is 6 months though some have gone for 3 years due to feature creep.
• Customers must bear costs of setup and have a formal business plan before starting and a strong commitment to finishing the job
• We can handle cost blowouts and stuffups due to internal software we have developed to stop the rorting.
• Cloud computing will remove 80% of the network and planning headaches for small business.

We charge:

• annual rates for regular maintenance
• hourly rates and weekly rates for one off jobs or support
• on a pay-as-you-go basis
• based on signoffs

We work:

• onsite for limited periods (in Australia) if economically feasible
• offsite via the Internet
• via mobile / wifi laptop

We outsource and advise on:

• domain name registration and hosting
• firewalls, security and wifi products
• broadband Internet access

We do not outsource to or let ourselves be leveraged off by:

• software companies
• business consultants
• Web designers
• entrepreneurs
• portal mongers in general
• Indian Web developers

Our range

• We only offer several services as follows to keep bookkeeping and management simple:
  • Web portal development,
  • network support,
  • writing, editing, indexing and publishing or
  • music
  at any one part of our dealings with the customer to best manage our resources.
• Occasionarlly we bundle these if it makes sense.
• On our own, we limit ourselves to smaller projects in short bursts via the Internet.
• We integrate a range of suppliers with our own services to create a top-rate solution for the customer.
• We are a niche player who can be very flexible and get things done quickly.
• We use basic infrastructure to develop Websites and write technical articles but can migrate to more intensive resources to handle portal development.

Complexities and Costs of Outsourcing

• We have a policy of no free technical support especially for free software.
• We do selective open source development as long as the overall benefit is in our favour.
• It is not possible for Web designers to outsource to us unless it is cost effective to maintain source code they require on a shoestring or we just install open source code for them and tune it for them or point them in the right direction to find the open source software themselves.
• Open source software has no support implied and Web designers need to learn to read it and work it out themselves or pay us to do the technical support, but we do not allow free support of open source software but they must test it themselves.
• We won't be messed around in the cheap end of the market with testing or choosing products only worth a few dollars and with no commitment from quite wealthy clients so they can save a dollar trying to emulate some great site for a bargain basement price.
• We are professionals. Let the amateurs mess around with cheap software.
• We develop software and give quite competitive rates to mid-sized scale.

Onsite Work and Relocation:

• We move to the site where the work is and put our goods in storage so we get the job (new policy).
  • We are a travelling salesman in New South Wales, ACT and Queensland to attract business and make it easier to deal with customers face to face or use local resources such as libraries or computer conferences.
  • In Australia we work onsite month to month by doing hot-desking, travelling light and using mobile phone and wifi internet.
  • We could not close a deal in Australia over the Internet as they are so far behind the times so made visits in the end to get business.
  • Before we only used to work onsite when there was an intense job, an emergency or we are starting a job or giving a status report in person.
  • We used to do visits rather than relocate and do development or technical writing or technical support remotely over the Internet, visiting the site or calling them to setup the job then coming back to work remotely in Orange or Brisbane or onsite at the customer's premises in Sydney from an office in Glebe or wherever our base was.
• Sydney
  • We work from a temporary base in Glebe, Sydney from which to visit customers as of June 2008 - close to the action and easy to commute round Sydney, not way out west with hours of commuting and poor transport
  • We tried to use a shared office in Wetherill Park, Sydney for a 2 week visit in 2007 but closed it due to technical difficulties and difficulty of getting there from the city and north shore and being forced to wait for a month for payment
  • Most customers in Sydney require onsite work which we subsidise to get underway.
• Brisbane
  • We tried to use a shared office for short periods in Brisbane QLD in 2008 as a base but it failed due to lack of resources, no customer growth, pressure and no financial support.
  • This evolved into a 2 year publishing project which is done away from the Brisbane in Sydney and Canberra but depends on archives in Brisbane which makes the job awkward to complete so it is on hold till we get a stable office again and buy InDesign and finish editing and indexing the book and publish it.
  • Two months after moving our registered office to Logan QLD in December 2009, we found a Brisbane Web customer and worked in their office to finish the job begun in Orange on the Internet.
• Orange NSW
  • We work onsite in Orange for short periods mainly to do bookwork, tax matters and administration which is quite successful and cost-effective
  • We do onsite and internet network support and Web design in Orange
  • We taught violin for 3 months.
• Canberra ACT
  • We work onsite in Canberra for brief periods to do research.
  • We may get an Australian Government contract via local small business enterprise centres but are struggling with high insurance costs in dealing with the Australian Government.
  • We built a multimedia Website onsite.
  • We taught violin briefly.
• USA and UK
  • USA and UK are much more sophisticated with knowledge work and it is easy to work with them remotely but the competition dried up all the opportunities back in 1998. This may have changed since 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis sending many competitors out of business.
  • Most of this work is Web 2.0, Google-based and mobile oriented which I am still new at and undergoing training to catch up for the next big wave of business.

Mix of onsite and offsite:

• We aim at doing nearly 100% of our work online or remotely to be cost competitive but acknowledge there are times when a visit is essential to keep the wheels turning or to get any serious amounts of money so we compromised in 2008 and gave up trying to work entirely remotely and work onsite on the customer's site or within the same city to manage and work for them directly.
• For offsite work to succeed, it meant a steep learning curve for the customer over time but the benefits would be huge for both of us in flexibility and leverage power which few customers had time or money to do. Hence we gave up on this idea and do our own work the entire time on the customer's site so the job is done on time otherwise the customer stuffs around because they are not up to speed with technology and everyone suffers.
• Not being bound to a location but using the Internet heavily gives us the edge on our fixed-address competitors. However sometimes we have to be bound if we are to make any serious money and this can mean hit and miss attempts at marketing on the ground to gain marketshare.

Managing customers:

• Technical knowledge helps us survive financial attacks
• (see Finance Management for our approach to controlling bad customers)
• We build mirror systems at our office in case the customer cuts us off without notice - this has happened twice to us and can make doing software development remotely risky as the customer can abscond without paying for the software and we have to travel to the customer's site to get the money which is expensive and time consuming stopping us being left in the lurch till we recover from the damage done.
• Legal action is drawn out and rarely recovers much at all leaving the customer the power to screw us around with impunity till we have money to chase them and collect the debts so having backups helps us to bounce back and approach our business from a different angle from which the bad customer cannot attack us as they are usually incompetent technically and easy to avoid from that angle even if financially they are much quicker than us and able to destroy us quite quickly by not paying or stuffing us around and wasting precious time.

Large Customers

We have not had any happy experiences contracting to large companies.

The ugly side of dealing with a large company is its bureaucracy and they can ignore you if they think you should go through the bureaucracy to get paid.

If a customer wants to play hardball then we suffer so in that case we walk away and find other customers who are more friendly towards us.

If the customer plays around when we are trying to get a specification out of them, we are not keen to do business with them as they may not pay us. So we just avoid them like the plague.

We tried to work away from our base in Sydney in June 2007 to perform a contract for a large company but we had to wait a month to get paid and pay all our own expenses which put a lot of stress on cashflow so we have given up doing that for now till we re-establish a base in Sydney in the future and will only deal directly with the large company not through an agent.

Created: 19 Nov 2000 9:29
Last Updated: 3 August 2010 21:12

WWWalker Web Development Introduction