Hive question; anyone have any idea of people to look to for nearshore development? Thinking small team initially, but growing to 2-3 teams in 12 months and possibly more thereafter. Happy to go through some assessment and due diligence, but interested in ideas from you lot as lets face it, being STW there will be some IT middle managers out there.

Type of work is likely to be reasonably well defined implementations of things we have been through in the company already, we’d ideally want an onshore co-ordinator from the company, or someone working very closely with the team to support them more than monitor them. Tech area is possibly Python, but that could change.

Thanks in advance for the help.

The first time around will be educational for your company, I imagine. Don’t expect to save money for a long while, then you won’t be disappointed.

Lots of quality monitoring essential. Quality of requirements is key. Are you establishing permanent employee base or a rolling rota of fixed price work package type contracts or something in between?

Clarity of contract also needed. What you will pay for, what you won’t pay for. How are you going to work with the unknown unknowns that always crop up, as well as just the known unknowns.

What’s your testing setup, do the offshore team author, author and test, or just test? Documentation, written here or there? etc.

Disclaimer, not a manager, but have worked with offshore teams.

Every time I’ve been involved with offshore teams it’s been challenging at first. (That’s company speak for it’s always an absolute *$£*^$£!*%”*£:>@>@>:@?.!$!>>”!?>% nightmare).

Company I work for is big enough to have it’s own offshore development and support teams but getting to that point was a struggle. We went through several iterations of trying to replicate our onshore roles (e.g. one person doing a bit of dev, bit of support, bit of training) before we said screw it and got separate teams for each function. This has been in place for a good few years now and we do see cost benefits.

Having a company provide those services is problematic as you don’t really know 100% what the on-shore person they replaced was doing before hand, and sure as eggs etc, you won’t have written that specific thing into the contract, which is where the shafting comes in…

Paying a company for discreet development packages is probably easier – if you’ve got your requirements nailed then the testing of what’s delivered should be easy 🙂

I’ve been dealing with outsourced partners for years (some nearshore).

Some quick pointers on some others I’ve experienced (we use hundreds across a number of partners)
They all want Time and Materials so if your requirements are poor, planning is not locked down and your business doesn’t control scope creep you will suffer.
Initially you they will provide you with their best developers which speak great English, they then start back filling with average developers.
Don’t get sucked into them as an extension of your teams, they’re suppliers who are trying to maximise revenue from you.
They’re not cheaper than taking on grads with a year or two experience.

Cheers folks, I’ve been through a few nightmare rounds before at a previous company, so have some idea of the needs on both sides. Worked with a permanent team in India and rolling staff in Romania. Never really been involved in the selection process before. To be honest it’s being considered as an option at the moment (not a cast-iron decision) and I’d be just as happy with Grads/Juniors coming in and learning from people they share an office with.

The company I work for offers near-shore and off-shore development but it’s generally managed as a local engagement (e.g. PM/account manger UK based and maybe some UK devs depending on skill set required). Also it would be as more of a complete project (e.g. application transformation) rather than just body-shopping some cheap devs so overall I doubt they’d be the cheapest option (if cost saving is your main driver). PM me if you want the company name but I don’t have any contacts in dev pre-sales/new business roles so probably not a lot of help!