 Hello, are you good? Yes. Yep. OK. Good evening, everyone. I'm Rocky Nihanya. And I work as a project manager at Community 42. You must have seen the rules downstairs. It's not that you must check it out now, because there's an after party as well. Anyways, so today we're here to talk about outsourcing and some of the issues that you might have faced or you can face in the future, you should decide to outsource your work. But before we start, let's just have a look at this. So what comes in your mind when you look at this? Discussion between the members of the community. OK. For those who do not know who these people are, they are two famous Hollywood celebrities. Akora Usho, Samita Wachane, is a source of entertainment. Laughter. Laughter, wow. Yeah, that's a good one. So I just said the base here. These are just two famous celebrities from the Hollywood Love Buster. They're very famous in acting. But over here, they're doing a picture call for a few good rounds. So what do you think they're doing actually? Are they doing it right? Can you ever imagine Paris Clinton doing investment advisory or Oprah Winfrey doing development? Or such a pinnacle in standard comedy? Can you imagine that? No. No? However fast you may run in the course of your imagination, but you'll be really hard to imagine. But all of these are successful people. Now why is that? Any guesses? They're in the right field. They're in the right field? Anything else? Right. Right decision? OK. So in short, they're all focusing on their core competencies. So as Bill Gates says, completely should focus on their core competencies and outsource everything else. That's one major reason of outsourcing. There are plenty of other reasons as well. Let's just have a look at a video which I found really interesting. Should we really outsource work or not? Let's just have a look. Sourcing is seen as a viable solution to many operational issues with small and big companies. Here are the top five reasons why outsourcing can boost your business to great heights. Outsourcing allows you to focus on core services. Outsourcing and non-core business functions will give you more flexibility to manage the core functions of your business. So management of non-core functions like call center operations, project development, and the like are transferred to your outsourcing partner. Finally, your company reaps all the advantages of your focused use of financial, human and management resources to be more effective and efficient in your delivery of services. Outsourcing gives you access to high-value talents and skills. If you are a startup or a small firm, you do not immediately have access to skilled employees. Even bank companies face the same issue as the cost of labor continues to rise. Outsourcing can then become your company's friend. The Filipino workforce ranks among the most globally competitive and skilled people. They are young, educated, English-speaking and skilled. These labor force are also not left behind in keeping pace with the rapidly evolving technology. As well as making the most value out of your investment to offer talents, the skills that these staff possess are suitable to any type of business processing operations. Outsourcing gives you the ability to cut costs. Cost reduction is often listed as one of the main reasons companies outsource. Depending on your goals, outsourcing can offer short to long-term benefits. Starting with the flexibility that it gives in allowing your company to expand operations, there is also the added benefit of reducing capital and recurring cost expenses. Cheaper labor costs, low inflation and big, big tax incentives allow you to save when you outsource. And with outsourcing, you can expect improved quality of service. Outsourcing helps improve service quality. Global companies are becoming more demanding to keep pace with the best business and service standard practice. As a tool, outsourcing can be effective in improving the quality of services through being innovative and flexible. With outsourcing, companies can now offer longer and more flexible service hours that can even sustain 24-7 operation. Outsourcing gives you access to technology. To keep up with the fast-paced changes in technology, startups and small companies can look up to outsourcing for help. Besides the cost of outsourcing, it is your outsourcing partner who usually invest and acquires new technological resources to match your clientele's operational needs. Sometimes, too, it is the outsourcing partner who even surpasses its customers in keeping pace with and in implementing new technologies. Of course, just five benefits are not all there is to expect when you sign an outsourcing contract. When done right, successful outsourcing can be an effective resource saving and joyous endeavor. Together, we can help make you become that company and hope to see you become that happy and satisfied partner. Find out more ways to enjoy outsourcing. Big outsourcing. Hi, outsourcing. Should we done? Should we just get crafting? Release close the session and probably start outsourcing work? Would you be able to do it right? And what if you do it wrong? Let's just have a look at some interesting examples. There's one very interesting relation between Apple and a Chinese company called Foxconn. Foxconn's massive capacity of producing iPhone and other Apple products at a really fast pace was an advantage to Apple, which is why outsourced work to Foxconn. However, there were plenty of reports about Foxconn's abysmal treatment to its co-workers, which is why a lot of Americans were outraged and a lot of Apple officials got embarrassed in short the company's reputation suffered. Another poster example for outsourcing would be Boeing. So Boeing was not new to outsourcing. It had outsourced a couple of times. It outsourced the production of landing gears, engines and batteries to different contractors. In fact, 50 top tier contractors. Now what it did in the process was that it completely surrendered the oversight of subcontracting as a result of which there were too many players doing too many pieces at one time with no centralized system of quality control. Well, quality and boring reputation both suffered inevitably. And then there's this example of Samsung. So as for the economists, South Korean companies do not prefer outsourcing and they think that American and European countries who outsource work are making a huge mistake in outsourcing as much manufacturing as they do. This is because they leave the other firms with an insight to their internal processes. It's because the blueprint that Samsung followed was saying that it followed when it used to work as a subcontractor for a Japanese firm. So the loss of intellectual property, security threat and plenty of other reasons how it could go wrong. But this doesn't mean that we should stop outsourcing. That's probably our core need because we need to make sure that we are only focusing on our core competencies. So we still need to do it right, right? So the question here is, how do I do it right? You have to make sure that you choose the right partner when you do outsourcing. And then I say partner, think of it like this. If you have to choose a life partner, what do you think of making even the mind useless mistake in choosing a life partner? What could terribly go wrong if you do one small mistake? So choosing an outsourcing partner is equivalent to choosing a life partner because your project's life is depending on the choice that you make. And people have different ideas of qualities that they would look for with their partner. I would just sum down some of the qualities that I feel should be important. So you have to make sure that you have the best quality in the partner that you outsource your work to but it should be dependable, right? So ensure that you have the bare minimum quality in the partner that you outsource your work to. Now that you know the quality that you need to use in order to judge somebody while you're outsourcing your project, the next question that comes is how do I go about it? So the first thing that you do on the list is you need to ask yourself these questions as many as you can because you first need to know where do you need help, how much help is required and what is the timeline by which you need to get the help you need. So you need to ask yourself these questions. Once you have your requirements you need to have a very crisp checklist based on your requirements. Now that's a way into a project. There can always be a generic checklist so you prepare your checklist of evaluation criteria or your requirements that you need to get done in your project itself. So that you have to make sure that you don't go to just one partner or you don't just blindly go and pick out one partner. It's always good to have good prospects. So you go and find out a couple of prospects who can become, how much one can become your partner and then while you do that the better the person, the partner that you're picking up is the right player partner or not. So you have to make sure that these choices are in place. So which one do you choose? Getting a list of prospects is probably simple. You can always get that from recommendations as the publicity takes in but which one do you choose and how do you go about choosing the right partner. Well, in order to do so first you need to make sure that you follow the simplest possible criteria for partner search which is the 3C criteria as we know it compatibility, capability and commitment. If everyone in the room here are aware of Drupal just raise your hands. Everybody? Okay, so I'm in the right room. Anyway, so now that I'm just focusing on the Drupal simply module, I'll talk about how you do our social Drupal project. So based on these three criteria we talk about each one in detail but this is just a bit. So based on all of these three criteria we can easily decide how to go about doing our social partner. And the reason why I picked up choosing this, this is the topic was because we got a project and there were so by expecting the code we realized that there were coming messages from different companies that are not two or not three by different companies. We were actually the nine part and my question was not why year the nine my question was how much paying, how much money, how much time was spent buying clients in order to go about it doing something, getting built nothing. So they spend a lot of time in money but actually got nothing with them. So that was a really big point. And that is when we came up with these three criteria using a companion partner when we talk about compatibility you have to make sure that the partner you choose when you're in a companion to work with that partner. And here mostly the outsourcing happens in the countries which have different answers. You usually do not outsource work to a very local vendor because then there's hardly any cost difference. You also have to take care of the costs so you do the cross cross country outsourcing and when you do that you have to make sure how manageable are the cross culture and the corporate culture differences. So both of your cultures need to align in some way or another at least in the vision of goals. So in terms of your goals how you can manage the time zone differences the language differences and whether your work ethics align with your partner or not you have some crucial factors to evaluate. Now language is not the only factor and language does not come for regional languages but it's also about the vocabulary of the terminology that we use in order to communicate to each other and understand the requirements for example what I understand in the module would be very different of what a person could not take to the background would understand the module. So you have to make sure that through the discussions you come on the same page and you develop that understanding of the requirements very easily and again the rule number one is ask many questions as many questions as possible. A lot can go wrong if you don't ask many questions. Last of the list is management practices we know that developers are dudes without them we open source project cannot be delivered but trust me project managers are studs without them you cannot that's what causing deliver is being slain. So to make sure that you have the right point of contact as well developers probably understand their language and there we will discuss what they do but if you make sure that somebody from the client's end as well and come to somebody from your partner's end as well both have that non-technical language of conversation as well because in the work that you need to tell them and then while you do that you need to choose whether the person in the partner you are picking up or not so you have to make sure that these choices are in place so which one do you choose getting a list of prospects is probably simple you can always get that from recommendation that is where publicity takes in but which one do you choose and how do you go about choosing the right partner where in order to do so first you need to make sure that you follow the simplest possible criteria for partner search which is the 3c criteria as we know it compatibility capability and commitment if everybody in the room here are aware of Drupal just raise your hands everybody so I am in the right room so now that I am just focusing on the Drupal technique audio I will talk about how you do associated for your Drupal projects so based on these three criteria we will talk about each one in the detail but this is a gist of it so based on what are these three criteria what do you decide how to go about choosing a partner and the reason why I picked up choosing this as a topic is because we got a project and there were so when we were expecting the code we realized that there were coming messages from different companies and not one, not two, not three by different companies and my question was not why year and night my question was how much paying, how much money how much time was spent by the client in order to go about it doing something getting built nothing so they spent a lot of time in money but actually got nothing in return so that was a really rich point and that is when we came up with these three criteria into choosing a companion partner when we talk about compatibility you have to make sure that the partner you choose when you are in a companion to work with that partner and here mostly outsourcing happens in the countries which have different sanctions you can really deny outsourcing to a very local vendor that is having a cost difference you also have to take care of the costs benefits that you can get out of outsourcing so you do the cross and when you do that you have to make sure how manageable are the cross culture and the cross corporate culture differences so both of your cultures need to align in some way or another at least in the vision of goals so in terms of your goals how you can manage the time zone differences the language differences and whether your work ethics align with your partner or not we have some crucial factors to evaluate now language is not the only factor and language is not for regional languages but it's also about the vocabulary or the terminology that we use in order to communicate to each other and understand the requirements for example what I understand in the module would be very different what a person could not think their background would understand in the module so you have to make sure that through the initial discussions you come on the same page and we develop that understanding of requirements very easily and again the rule number one is ask many questions as many questions as possible a lot can go wrong if you don't ask the right questions last of the list is management practices we know that developers are adults without them we open source project cannot be delivered but trust me project managers are studs without them you cannot the chances of having a successful project delivered the right point of contact is there developers probably understand their language and maybe that's what they do but you can make sure that somebody from the client manager and your partner manager both have that non-technical language of conversation as well because he may not but he may not be able to look it straight but you should have enough trust on your stories, on your partners that he will be able to guide you for such things that you are the important teacher that you miss out and they can find a director believe something like this in my experience I can say you should also get an experience by a teacher so that kind of consistency more has to come we spoke about Volkswagen and Apple probably one of the most successful partnerships Apple will try but yes there was an issue in the Indian context like a lot of from outside how do they get to know whether people have treated people well how do you assure them that you do that and where is it like I don't see anything any cultural indication how does the person across like say in Los Angeles or California like New York know that the company I am sourcing with all the employees well how does it show like how do you value do that so if you really want to judge on what is the company cultured or what kind of activities they do whether they are particularly happy or not one easy may not be very helpful but we are doing that we will be checking on the company website for blogs in particular written by employees which are not which are not developed but cultured and involved people and that would not be written by company officials there would be employee authors who will be doing that it would probably be published with the companies but you can always check out blogs and apart from that now is the time of social media go check out the company's facebook page there will be lots of pictures depicting company's culture that yes that depends on the kind of company you are hiring it would be very difficult to find out the culture of the company which is very huge because the part that you are outsourcing or the smaller thing that you are outsourcing you may not be able to specifically find out that particular part but the heroes know it is very important but as a company as a whole we can always check out social media that will help can I add here the the document that which I have seen which I have seen being working into sales and pre-sales typically when they release the RFI and then RFB during RFI itself they will ask lot of questions what is your thought of conduct what is your talent management what about your privacy policies what about your security stuff and whole lot of quality and all that set of questions they will ask in RFI which is very valuable and then when you go to RFB they can clear down and when you get further selected for the presentation and the final acquisition they really really get everything what they need so that's how I see but now in the digital world if you see all the social media and blog and all that even that gives you more clear picture you can always ask for information but if you don't believe again you have to need to have trust information provided is up to level correct in after social media helps yeah just to add I think what is the point that Denise raised today morning like you see a lot of companies doing contributions from the company account that's a that the culture is not open if the individuals are not part of the building like especially in open source like if any company is asking you and then you talk to a developer that's also a smell yeah I think I get that so if companies can do that that speaks about the trust that the company has if they are masking there is something wrong I know some companies like you know have some of their papers I think that was that answer gives a confidence for a client that kind of answer gives the kind of confidence that if you can have your developer interface directly with the client then the company has enough trust and the culture is very open otherwise like you know there is few people go and put stuff in last door which kind of averages out of the way things boxon stuff never came out from the boxon Facebook site stuff it was interrogative reporting right it's very difficult to look at small companies I think yes I think these are things which if people do if companies put their employees on the front and they can make on the face confidence that people see in the employees talking I think I think that I think that's a great point I have a point to share with you guys also you know like you raised the issue which was related to maybe a company sitting in US they are also a project to a union company which is not that big so say there is a language barrier also a developer maybe best at coding things but may not be best at negotiating or dealing with the clients directly so that's where the interface is also required but at least when we talk about culture of the organization which I truly believe in there are certain value system that the company sitting in US have and a certain value system that the company sitting in India has if there is a map between the two maybe a small map if they are mapping okay I am at the top of the note they have a certain value system which is mapping with mine and I can talk about it it might be difficult in the beginning when you are outsourcing for them to really reduce their developers for you but for many of reasons one being that they are not insured already so they cannot stay in developer into pre-sales so they may not put developer into the company that is why the background checks that we do the experiences that we get you can always talk to and you can always ask the vendor directly is it okay if I speak to your references the people that you mention as references they should be good to talk about you so you can always ask for those references they would know that because what happens is that when a project is in progress you will always see the team interacting with the client directly and when the teams interact with the clients then you see that that openness or that the employee culture that comes out during those conversations but it is a little hard to know that in the very beginning so to do that you can do that reference check and then social media and Facebook and blog post not the glass door blog post but definitely the company blog post written by the company employees here and then that helps and like we mentioned the open source contributions any company who doesn't have a good culture may not promote yeah so they may not promote so contributions speak for themselves and all that and last on the list was communication so everything apart it cannot be a successful project if there is improper communication from all ends whether it is questions from the developers or questions from the pre-sale team or questions from the client who is outsourcing the questions have to come and they have to come in the right way so you communicate really well communication is the key to having a successful project outsourced so I think that was all of it that's how you choose the right partner there are a lot of other things as well which will be specific to your projects so if you have any additional questions you can write to me you can give me my card you can write to me or you can or you can also give me other questions both are needed for now we just have a quick question on this session if there are additional questions here how do they identify the things that you are outsourcing that's a good question how do you identify what you need to outsource so here first I would just like to know what exactly are you doing right now do you have an in-house technical team yes a fresh team or a very strong team relatively strong team so here I really think you would need to outsource development work but if you have just started and you want clients so the outsourcing of marketing that can be done you can always choose that is if you really need it if you are getting clients on your own hire somebody else to do the marketing stuff so first question is what help do you need do you really need help in any domain of course the one is marketing other one is recruitment we may have a couple of other items so again writing is like a said development because you are already relatively strong so you would not need to hire an agency for development but you definitely need partners who can help you with recruitment and there again you need to make sure although the references and the contributions and all would be different the references would be completely different from a Drupal development shop then a hiring shop but yes you can always check them out you need to identify where help you need do you need help in marketing like you said you also answered your question in a way do you need help in marketing it is a situation of dialogue I have many accounts I am not sure if he outsources to the right partner because there are people who do account management who manage your finances obviously Paris will not know her own tax management she does it somebody else rather so there are people who do that but you have to make sure that you trust the right people you go to the right people and the choice of that would again be dependent on how you choose your prospects so that has to be our thing but again the first question is does your organization does any outsourcing no we take more it is other way around yeah I see other way around but actually the reason I am there with this talk is because I just found some problems that other people are facing in outsourcing and the things that we realize we offer as consultants after which so even off topic like not really related to project work but as consultants if we offer some advice how our clients take it those kind of inputs from the client maybe deliver the talk about outsourcing because it becomes really difficult to find the right partner some of the companies what they also do is they hire a third party Drupal expert to check in with you on your technical skills because they also have the technical expertise in place that again depends on your budget so that is something which has to be cost effective if you want to do it so I do not include that in the presentation so we take works if you have work we do it by you like this like though we are good at development development is kind of a broad spectrum we do have SEO, we do have hosting that also part of development so we are wondering if we should have our own team for those stuffs or should we outsource that depends on cost again so it has to be cost effective your core competencies again development and by development I mean coding and website development SEO is something that I don't really feel that a development strong needs to hire a different agency altogether maybe hire people to do the SEO work because it has to be cost effective in the end you cannot go beyond your budget and hire or go and subcontract multiple things to multiple people and then have the extra load of managing all of that maybe actually put a done that in your house my institution actually needs to hire this developer's team so will I be hiring only the developer's team or the team manager there has to be a manager who will be the team for you to interact with the team now so the interaction will be manager to manager level not the basic developer's level so depends on how technically some who are if you yourself come to a technical background and you can understand the technical jogging reasoning you can interact with the technical team as well and they can speak technically to you but if not then you will always have one point of contact in the part we are also seeing your work to who will be able to understand your language which is non-technical and give you the solution even with that same language so suppose their work culture and our work culture is completely different their vision is different so how do you just fall in sync with that what kind of difference is there every company has a different vision the goal of their company my company has a different way of friendly involvement in this maybe you can follow hierarchical involvement so how do you just fall in sync with that I am a student I have no idea about this I am just asking how do we ask them you should ask these questions to the partner itself what is your company culture do you have a flat hierarchy or do you have a level hierarchy can people directly come and talk to the CEO or do they have to go through levels and then talk to that if you have a flat hierarchy anybody can go and talk to anyone no questions asked so I think that's a 10 year way or probably a 10 year atmosphere which is also something important for any company to do well for the employees to be happy and you would not want that the person just above you is not in good talking terms to you you lose everything that you have right now because just your senior is not speaking well to you no questions ma'am I want to ask one question now I am very new to Drupal actually and we want to migrate our website to Drupal now after coming here I understood that Drupal is completely different now it's not something which is the proper IT managed services like in the past we had IT services which were very much I would say streamlined Drupal is something it's an open source platform IT developers who have contributed or worked on Drupal for a long period of time now as I need to migrate my website I mean in talking more in Drupal like you know how is outsourcing works or should I be trying to hire someone in house or it will be better for me to you know outsource it so here apart from cost one important factor will be time if you decide of hiring somebody training the person and even varying the extra infrastructure cost of providing engineering facilities and laptops and other logistics so that cost and then outsourcing your work to a Drupal development shop who can do it, who are already skilled they've done something similar before so it depends on what you prefer do you have enough time and money to spend on training and infrastructure or not if not then you should definitely go and outsource we can hire in house also but after my trading do we really need a Drupal developer for a long time it depends on the kind of project but in general we don't really need a technical agency to support it it's a CMS so the content management is really simple provided you hire the right person who does a very simplified architecture so here your first requirement is you want a simplified website whose content management is simple enough for you who doesn't have technical Drupal expertise to understand that and to use that on a daily basis also if you want value additions or additional features to be added in the future you would go back to that shop or maybe have a new shop there should be documentation again depending on where you go back to but then the CMS itself is that it needs to be simple enough for you to understand it so you would not need to have any in-house with your team to manage the content web content specialist people so they basically do offering and then we have a huge marketing team which are completely non-technical so we need to train them you know once we migrate we obviously need to train them and they should be able to work on Drupal trust me the training to manage content on Drupal is very simple depending on the length or huge the volume of the website if the training days can vary from few days to a month time that's maximum but I'm not even going to a month-long training between the right amount of trainings at the right intervals in the project you could probably do it with just five days of training and because they're content managers who do content authors they can manage themselves they don't even need that much training if they know just how to use an app they would be able to do it one more thing I'm a little uncertain of is on a longer run there are new versions of Drupal that get launched so do I need to always like upgrade my website to the new version that would be a good thing to do in the longer run you need 15 years, 20 years no maybe 2 years down the line I don't think 2 years down the line you'll have another version Drupal 8 took a lot of time to come and Drupal 8 is very powerful probably here onwards migrating from a Drupal version to the next Drupal version would become simpler in fact, without Drupal 8 release there were already 57,000 plus websites on Drupal 8 so just imagine the power of Drupal that without even actually having Drupal 8 specific everything available without the proper Drupal 8 release, there were people who already started building on it so it wouldn't be very hard to migrate your website to another and probably if you're talking a few years down the line you might have too much to do that but it would not be that difficult to do it and you would not have to do it every two years that is when you do the version thing okay one last question Drupal version upgrade if you mean there are two types of upgrades you can do one is a major release and a minor release so there are releases like 8.1, 8.2, 8.1.1, 8.1.2 and in every release they publish something called release note you read the release note and see whether that release note has something to do with your website if it is a security release and if that security release affects your site you do it immediately if there is a security release that does not have any impact on your site you can postpone it to the next release so it's not mandatory to always upgrade but you have to read the release notes and then decide what release okay thanks and that is usually not a big problem one last question so Drupal has an open source platform and ours is like a business website so how feasibility is and is it like a secure platform Drupal came in a variety of regions or domains I would say from e-commerce to business to publishing to MSR social websites called the management learning management systems so that is more different kind of websites I haven't yet come across a kind of website that can be known in the community there might be something where caught in management music in years which is like a monthly offer but I haven't come across one yet and for business websites we come with brand websites and CSR websites e-commerce and publishing so I know that it was kind of okay thanks Drupal actually whichever if you take it 7 usually give the lifespan of 4 to 5 years so let's say current your version of Drupal site may be on a 7 so don't worry for another 3 years until you get the full mature Drupal 8 you know Drupal.org will support you n-1 which is like if your current version latest version is 8 they will actually support you old security patch and everything till 7 but if you have 6 then don't worry so don't take each and every time to go ahead and migrate and the guy has mentioned like if it is related to your site if it is related to security then just update that patch only don't go all the so that's one thing and now that you have now that you have this probably the part that you hire to do your work you can directly ask him these questions discuss that kind of an engagement if at all you need it then how would that be managed because if you know of some things then it's better to be on the safer side and we'll discuss those things till that we get closer any other questions so thank you everyone for coming I just want to give you my cards if you need any contact for anything I will do outsourcing but I can take over if you need to get done or if you are going to do outsourcing then you can always write to me or contact me so all that to me thank you