IT outsourcing company offers attractive jobs but candidates are expected to have above average technical as well as communication skills – only such people can succeed in outsourcing projects.
Recruitment is one of the most time-consuming processes.
Time is running out very quickly when you are looking for suitable people to the project for which you are personally responsible.
In such cases you interview people with extreme caution and very carefully but you have no guarantee that you will select the best candidate or even a proper one. The longer the process takes, the less convinced you are. It is especially very annoying if the project requires deep domain knowledge, so you have to invest a lot of time in training. Sometimes, you are not convinced towards this investment for a long time – 6 months or even longer. Both parties, employee & employer, bear the risk of this investment, finally, the customer pays for this experiment. To reduce the risk and improve the process we decided to have a training session with a professional who has 20+ years HR experience. That was the move in the right direction but the selection is still risky & full of doubts.

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We are working globally. A lot of our customers are located thousands kilometers away during development process – we are providing outsourcing IT services all around the globe: Europe, United States, Australia…

This year we will have an opportunity to work in international team inside our office. Four Spanish developers – students will come to our company to spend here 3 months working with us. We are looking forward to training our Spanish :)

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PGS Software is listed on NewConnect – the market regulated by Warsaw Stock Exchange. This has given us transparency and visibility which is a good argument for our clients. We did not really need extra funds, and that is why only small number of shares is publicly traded. Unfortunately that means that the liquidity is on the minimal level. We will try to do something about it. Anyway I’m happy to attach some information about how Polish Exchange is doing. I think it’s a great achievement and shows again the power of the Polish Economy.

From WSE Press Release:

The Warsaw Stock Exchange is in the first place among European stock exchanges in terms of the number of newly listed companies in 2009, according to the latest IPO Watch Europe report prepared by PwC. The first time in its history, the Warsaw bourse takes the top position.

“The Polish capital market becomes one of the barometers and instruments of European economy development. Large transactions carried out through the Warsaw Stock Exchange, both as initial and secondary public offerings, support that statement” – Ludwik Sobolewski, WSE President, comments the recent PwC report.

According to the latest IPO Watch Europe report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Warsaw is in the top position in terms of the number of IPOs not only in the CEE region, but also compared to such established exchanges as NYSE-Euronext, Nasdaq-OMX or Deutsche Boerse. The WSE already occupied high, runner-up, positions in 2008 and 2007 but it is the first time in its history that the Warsaw bourse is in the top spot in the IPO Watch report. In terms of the IPOs value in 2009, the WSE is the third largest exchange in Europe.

The WSE’s high position regarding primary market activity is a result of both a large value of shares subscribed by investors and a high number of new listings. The PwC report has been compiled for years following the same methodology. The fact that the WSE has been advancing systematically in recent years towards the top position in European rankings proves how effective, significant and recession-proof the WSE is as a mechanism of raising equity.

WSE’s high position in 2009 is a result, among others, of the PGE (Polska Grupa Energetyczna) offering (first listing: Nov. 6) which was the largest IPO in Europe in the fourth quarter.

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Our web page was 5 years old. As old as the company. Time moves on, so things change. I’m not a big fan of changing things for a sake of changing them. But this time it has a better reason. We want all our visitors and customers to get needed information quicker and better. I hope that with the new design it will work that way.

We rarely have time to work on internal projects typically being very busy serving our customers. This time it had to happen, so with extra effort we managed to finish that project on time and in the way we wanted it from the beginning. What I (again) realized was how difficult it is sometimes to finish internal projects in planned time-frame. They always drop at the end of to-do list when the customers call you. And since our customers have been calling us very often recently getting this done was challenging. Well – it happened – I hope you like it!

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I love Dilbert. I love getting the strip every day to my mailbox. I found this one great and related to the subject which I’m keen on recently – estimations. See here.

Isn’t it like whenever you are asking to get something done at the unreasonable price you will pay the real bill eventually anyway. Maybe that will happen later, when you have to fix poorly written code to add new functionality? Or maybe when you ask for a slight modification your vendor will ask ridiculous price and you will have no choice, because only they understand this piece of garbage you got, and everybody else will say “re-write it!”?

And again to one of my previous posts – is everybody lying when bidding…? I often think that’s a case.

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It’s really difficult to amaze my wife. At most she may say something like “nice”, when she sees some incredible things on my screen.

Today I won! I showed her something what our team in Rzeszów did. And she was AMAZED!!!

Pictures are better than any words, so just look here.

Merry Christmas!

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Cash is the king. It’s always true, but these days it’s true more than ever. When cash is in scarce the one having it is the one winning the competition. Luckily PGS Software is safe. We have enough cash to go through the crisis. But recently we had to make an accrual for old receivables. That ate a big chunk of our profits. What makes me really mad is that some of that comes from lack of integrity of some clients. Just because they are in a different country they feel like they are safe not paying us. Everybody may have problems, and we have been very lucky finding partners who helped us when we needed and who got help from us when we could help them. That is great. But like always in life: 80% of you clients are great, but the other 20% make you sleepless. Yes – contracts help. And we will use them in the court, but I want to focus on growing the company not on going to the court.I hate that part of my job.

Outsourcing is all about trust. Typically it’s about trust the customer has in vendor. These days it goes in the other direction as well. Will they pay or go away hoping that you won’t find them? Luckily most of our clients are great businesses with integrity and personal values you can always rely on.

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Professor Magne Jorgensen in his studies about estimating software development projects has proven an interesting fact. Depending on how the customer calls the same request for change: “Minor extension” or “New functionality” for exactly the same thing - the estimation typically changes by 10%!!! Of course requests for “minor extensions” were estimated lower than “new functionalities”. That means that we are all very sensitive to how the question is formed apart from its real meaning.

Now everybody knows why our clients always ask us to do “minor change”. They do it, because their clients do exactly the same thing… etc.

Also – now we know that the person who makes the estimation should know as little as possible apart from facts. Pure facts.

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Recently we have had (not the first time) a pleasure to host professor Magne Jorgensen from Norway. It’s been the third or fourth time when he did some of his studies using PGS Software as an example of Poland-based software development company.

For more information of professor’s work please look here. Apart from his studies, we got a great seminar about typical problems with estimating software development projects. I won’t jump into details today, but I wanted to say something different. This is a fantastic and immediately ready to use piece of science which any software company should use as well as their clients.

Each of companies like PGS Software struggles with two things: preparing right (and realistic!!) estimation of the project. The second problem is how to convince the client that this is a real one. In the real world the typical scenario looks as follows:

The client asks for quotation for particular project several potential vendors. They all give quotes. Based on Simula’s studies all (almost all?) of those estimations are too low!!! The client chooses either the cheapest vendor, or one of the cheapest based on other criteria. What has to happen is that in the course of the project (or even before it starts), the vendor has to realise that the budget is too low. It can choose to cut corners on quality hoping that the project will be accepted, or reduce its margin and provide more work for the same money, or the combination of both. There is no other way. Does the client benefit from the lower estimation? Partially yes, but mostly no. The client will get the product of lower quality than expected and will need another budget in the future to fix it. Also, it risks reputation in front of its clients, because of the poorer service. So who wins? Nobody. Vendor did not make enough money, the client got poor product. If the client is not familiar with technology well enough to check estimations, which is usually a case, it has a difficult dilemma: which vendor to choose if the one with the lowest estimation is the cheapest, but probably is also the biggest liar (or the least professional) from all the others. I don’t have the answer here other than the price cannot be the only driver. I’ll get some of professor’s advises together with PGS Software experience in the next posts.

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One of the things that are key in outsourcing is communication. Trivial? Yes. So what is the standard? What is a minimum set of tools to be used? I have been looking around and have found many different setups. Some of them amazed me. Some were less than acceptable.

Here are a few examples:

• One company offered invisible access to desktop of any developer at any point of time to allow the customer to see how the time is being used. That was a bit surprising for me. Is this a way of building the trust? Don’t think so.
• I know the company which has time booking system visible for a customer. Great. Well – I know their customer as well, who eventually found out, that they actually have double systems. The data does not necessary match in both of them. Oooops.
• Another company has fully open system to a customer. The customer can see exactly what the time has been spent on. And they challenge many tasks claiming that they should take less time. Sometimes battles take hours for tasks worth minutes.

So where is the right way?

I’m not sure if I know the answer. Here is what we do at PGS:
All systems are visible in the same way for the team at PGS and the client (code repository, time tracking, bug tracking etc.) No system is used only internally.
Each client gets weekly report with the list of what has been accomplished, what is planned for next week, planned vacations, holidays etc.

We host our own Microsoft Live Meeting server with what we love – Microsoft Roundtable now renamed to Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference. This is a camera which gives you 360 view of the room and allows you to see who is talking by enlarging the speaker’s picture.  Initially when we proposed to use videoconferencing with clients many people were very skeptical. Now – this is the heaviest used piece of hardware in our offices. We have it in both locations, and any meeting internal of external is held using it. We use it because it’s “free” for us now (yes –it gets amortized each month).  I must say that has been one of the best investments we have ever made.
One other thing we love to use about communication is not any tool. It’s SCRUM. No – there is no magic there. There is a lot of discipline that it brings to both a vendor and a customer. It eliminates a lot of unnecessary discussions later when it comes to financials. And it brings visibility to the real progress of the project. No screen spying can do it. Scrum burn down chart can.
Outsourcing is about trust. Trivial again. Trust is built on communication – personal and remote. And making remote as close to personal as possible makes this really good. It won’t replace travel but it will reduce it significantly. It brings so much productivity – so it pays back quickly.

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