WWWalker's Outsourcing

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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 a 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

• we are looking at using virtualization to improve outsourcing as we can replicate test environments without having access to the customer's site. At present we build inhouse mirror sites for testing to combat poor internet access due to the customer skimping on infrastructure.

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 12 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 though we can handle cost blowouts and stuffups due to internal software we have developed to stop the rorting.

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

We outsource and advise on:

• domain name registration and hosting
• firewalls and security 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

Our range

• We only offer one service at a time and do not mix them up to keep bookkeeping and management simple: one of Web portal development, network support or technical writing at any one part of our dealings with the customer to best manage our resources.
• 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. This stops waste of time getting us to install something they don't like, even though it costs them nothing but us a lot of time messing around.
• Open source software has no support implied and Web designers have 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 and then chopping and changing and messing us around because they don't like it or won't spend money buying software and testing 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 compared to the large end of town.

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 and ACT 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 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 and slow customer growth and a lot of pressure to achieve beyond what was possible with limited resources.
• 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
• Canberra ACT
  • We work onsite in Canberra for brief periods to do research (no customer focus at this stage due to high insurance costs in dealing with the Australian Government)
• 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.

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.

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.

Hope Over Bullies

God helps us succeed against really difficult customers like David who Saul tried to kill all the time because of jealousy but God gave David escapes time after time till he became king and Saul died on his own sword, a complete loser and out of favour with God because he did not obey God but followed his own wilful ways.

Bullies are cowards who lose in the end. Also low-tech customers can be handled by not getting them involved in the process of software development and delivering a finished product that they cannot muddle through.

This approach is getting back to end-user customers and just chewing the design and implementation of the product for them so they have to next to nothing to do as the more they do the more the process is ruined and cost blowouts and stress increase. This is a bit like what a mother does for a baby who has no teeth - she chews the food and spits it into the baby's mouth and all they have to do is swallow it. A very immature person must be dealt with this way to save massive wastage and wreckage due to their lack of education and skills.

Large Customers

The other side of dealing with a large company is its bureaucracy. 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 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.

Created: 19 Nov 2000 9:29
Last Updated: 12 Oct 2008 18:49

WWWalker Web Development Introduction