If you are committed to your ecommerce strategy, I’d argue the most important factor in starting a new ecommerce website is the design.  Yes, of course, technical backend processing is critical, but it isn’t even an issue if users are not buying!  Buyers are more willing to purchase from sites with clean, professional design.  Ecommerce design can be a humbling experience and follows a path full of obstacles.  However, the process of designing your ecommerce website has essentially two challenges to overcome when attempting to save time and money.  In this article, I’ll describe these two common challenges and then offer the solution to save you time and money in ecommerce designs.

Challenge 1: Finding an Ecommerce Designer

Most people don’t know where to begin when trying to find an ecommerce designer.  Most often, they start by asking their network including family, friends and business colleagues.  This approach is fine and you have a chance to find a good designer.  Studies have shown you are more likely to trust a designer found through your contacts as well.  However, I suggest this approach is old and tired.  There’s a better way to increase your chances of finding a high quality ecommerce designer.

Challenge 2: Communication with Ecommerce Website Designer

Obviously, ecommerce design is visual – you can’t touch, smell or feel it.  So, how do you convey what visual elements you like?  or dislike?  It’s not simple like saying the smell is nasty or the object is sharp.  How do you and your designer communicate?

Maybe you expect the designer to lead you in the ecommerce design process?  If you’re like most people, you probably do.  For example, you might expect the designer to engage with you through interview questions.  Or, if you’re prepared, you might be able to share your corporate style guide, logo or color palette.  In addition, you might share some website designs you like based on your research.  But, what happens next?

Well, based on past experience, I’m guessing you expect the designer to show you their design concepts to review next.  In other words, they’ve asked their questions, received some materials from you and have created some initial designs for your review.  So finally, you’ve reached the point where you can tell the designer what you like or dislike.  Then, your designer can take your feedback and come up with some more design concepts.

Again, I wouldn’t fault you for thinking this way.  It’s a common approach.  But, it’s plagued with inefficiency and there is a better way.  Because let’s face it- a designer is going to need to cover their costs in this approach.

Solution: There’s a Better Way

Before finding or committing to a designer, research and buy an ecommerce template.  There are numerous online solutions available.  TemplateMonster has ecommerce templates for popular open source ecommerce software including magento themes and zencart templates.  ThemeForest has templates for Magento and Shopify as well.  Finally, I hope you don’t mind a plug for my site, but www.CommerceUI.com offers Shopify themes.

But, how does buying an ecommerce template solve the these two challenges?

Challenge 1: Solution: Finding the right Ecommerce Designer

If you purchase a template, you can hire a designer customize it unique and fulfill your needs.  Finding a designer for this type of customization is much more straightforward to describe and find than asking your network.  In other words, it’s easier to outsource to a wider audience of designers.  Specifically, you can post your project one of the popular service procurement sites such as vworker or elance.

But, what about the horror stories you’ve heard about using someone you don’t know?  How can you trust them?  Well, in regards to trust, many of these sites have feedback ratings on providers.  Read them.  If someone has been burned in the past, they probably gave the designer negative review.  Also, now that you have a template and design in mind, the cost to outsource will be much less than “from scratch”.  So, your investment risk of  much less when hiring for customization rather than entire new design.

Challenge 2: Solution: Communication with Ecommerce Website Designer

I’m convinced most communication problems happen when people do not know what they want.  If you don’t know what each other wants, how can you communicate what you want?  It’s a rhetorical question, but I’m trying to make a point.  By choosing an ecommerce theme, we’ve made simplified the communication process because both parties have a much clearer idea of expectations from the beginning.  Because we’ve have a much clearer, visual reference for what we want, communication between you and designer is straightword.  There is no need to read each other’s mind or be overly sensitive in communication.

Conclusion

Ecommerce design involves facing many challenges, but two critical obstacles are: “Finding an Ecommerce Designer” and “Communication with Ecommerce Website Designer” .  Both of these challenges can be met by following the solution provided in this article.  Using this solution, you will find an easier path and higher chance for success.

Related posts:

1. Community Driven Website Tool: Drupal CMS
2. Web design by Offshore Outsourcing
3. Example of Outsourcing Article Writing for Your Website

There are several development tactics introduced by Agile. Most tactics focus attempt to minimize and/or expose risk in developing software in short amount of time. Iteration is the development of software in one unit of time, and this may last from one to four weeks. It includes planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, and testing. Software developed during iteration need not be functional enough to be released as a product in the market, but the objective is to have working software, without bugs, at the end of each iteration. The team re-evaluates the project priorities at the end of each iteration.

Traditional outsource challenges are amplified and new challenges are created when software development is taken offshore. These new challenges are mainly in cultural differences, combined with the communication difficulty due to the difference in time and language comprehension. Most importantly, the biggest challenges remain in communicating, transfer of business logic understanding, demand in co-operation in poorly defined projects, unknown and imprecise requirements and lack of customer involvement, differences between customer and vendor, geographical distance, and many more. To be successful with offshore software development, these hurdles need to be overcome by both the onshore and offshore teams.

In plan-driven and Agile as well, face to face communication is stressed to improve communication and understanding of the project. This type of face to face time takes place during each iteration, where plan-driven project is concerned and this took place essentially at the beginning of the project. When face to face time is not possible with the offshore provider, it is beneficial to have each developer answer 3 daily questions: what you did yesterday? what you plan to do today? describe any roadblocks or obstacles in completing the iteration stories? Each developer should answer these question and not simply the offshore project manager. Perhaps the offshore project manager can help in translating the answers to these questions.

In case of Agile, face to face meetings are held at all time, usually in the form of daily Scrums, pair programming, iteration retrospectives and iteration planning. In distributed development teams, many times the onshore managers travel offshore to hold meetings with the offshore team, or in other circumstances, managers from offshore travel onshore for meetings. One important influence depends on the offshore person visiting the onshore team to absorb the project details and develop/foster relationships. He should take this know-how from the onsite team in a way that he is knowledgeable enough to answer many questions raised by his offshore team. In addition, he should be also capable of relating to his team members about the decisions that were taken in his meetings with the onsite team. Depending upon the complexity of the project, a member of the onsite team, with good knowledge in business logic is often sent to work offshore.

In implementing Agile projects, a series of processes are utilized. The development process is not just a single approach. In implementing software offshore development, there are some principles that are followed, which have been termed as Agile Manifesto. These are as follows -

➢ Customer satisfaction is achieved by rapid and continuous delivery of useful software.
➢ Quick delivery of working software within weeks rather than months.
➢ The principle measure of development progress is derived from the working software.
➢ Any changes in the software may be incorporated later.
➢ Necessity in having face to face communication for better understanding.
➢ Maintain close relationships between the business people and the developers.
➢ Motivation and trust on the individuals make the project implementation successful.
➢ Apply continuous attention to the project design, and try to attain technical excellence.
➢ Adapt fast to changing circumstances.

It was found that the iterative framework brought benefits to Agile software development vendors. By this approach, the customers could make payments after each iteration. By paying this way, the customer does not lose or be in a risk to pay the for the whole lot after the completion of the project. This brought in commitment from the customer to provide the vendor with better business and motivates the vendor to consider each iteration important. The method of continuous feedback and communication helps in the offshore development process, but the approach of short iterations has proved to be especially successful.
Another aspect of Agile development is the importance of testing in each iteration. Each iteration should produce automated tests that can be used during each iteration and future iterations as well. The benefits of automated testing is better covered in different articles. However, in the context of this article, it is important for your offshore vendors to deliver automated tests with each iteration. When considering new vendors, ask about their testing strategies. It is better to go with a vendor who believes in automated testing, rather than trying to convince a vendor the benefits of automated testing.
So, in sum, when implementing Agile in distributed development teams, there are opportunities to address three aspects of the project: communication, payment/deliverables and automated testing.

Related posts:

1. How to Implement Agile Offshore Development
2. What is Agile Software Development?
3. What Every Manager Ought To Know About Agile Development

The combination of OSS and offshore development, yield high quality, and cost effective software, which is more easily available. As it is it is a good idea in having OSS as a part of the software development project that you want to outsource. However that is a different topic all together, but covered in a previous article Open Source and Offshore Development.

In choosing to outsource your software development project, it is not only the pure coding skill that should be considered as far as the offshore company is concerned. A decision to outsource your project involves many other aspects to be considered before that decision is taken. There is obvious trust that you should have on the offshore company, who you wish to partner with, and this trust would develop over time. However establishing trust needs to have a beginning. First of all the offshore company should be having good references of their previous work. There should be case studies that you can go through, which would reflect their professionalism in the work that they have done so far. At the same time the applicable skill set that the team has, needs to be evaluated. Even after all these, there could be those nagging doubts that you may have in trusting the offshore company in the way you would want to, since the company concerned is not a referral from one of your previous contracts.

OSS source is the foundation of trust and confidence when you choose to outsource your software development. It provides you with the trust in the software being developed. It provides insurance in the worst case the project has not been delivered in the way you wanted. You still have the code and your infrastructure based on open source architecture which can be resumed or modified by a different software development partner. In other words, you still have the opportunity to engage other programmers to update the software much faster, since it is based on open source. If open source was not used as the base of the software being developed, it would have been more difficult to replace the programmers, in the event of worst case scenarios.

There are different interpretations to the term open source. In the previous example, open source would mean the complete product, which includes, tools, libraries, etc. Delivery of the developed software would not just mean delivery of the source code with the solution. It has to include the open source product, tools, library, and others which need to have some established resources. This reduces the time and effort of the new programmers in analyzing the software. The new programmers would take much more time to get on to the speed, if the software development is not based on community based open source software.

When you choose to outsource your software development, chose developers who would use open source architecture in developing the software. In such outsourced projects, open source provides the confidence and trust in much shorter time. In a decision to outsource, open source takes a positive approach to your risk management system. You can obtain the most competitive cost in choosing a vendor who would use community established open source architecture with appropriate license. This would provide you with the quality that you require.

Related posts:

1. Open Source and Offshore Development
2. Best Open Source Java CMS
3. Establishing and Managing Risk factors in Offshore Software Development

This is a continuing post on the series of outsourcing article writing. Outsource Article Content Part I, Outsource Article Content Part II. There are many parallels in outsourcing software development. Sure, you receive Java, Ruby, PHP code back, but many times it requires a significant investment in making the code comprehensible. Many people and organizations have experienced this missing of expectations when offshoring software development. It takes time and effort to find good partners.
—

Developing software is an activity that requires intensive knowledge in the field of its expertise. The differences in cultures, languages, development practice, power structure within organization, quality standards, documentation, time zones, and software updates and estimations hinder outsourcing of software development to other countries in more ways than one. As it becomes a widespread practice for organizations, in outsourcing of software projects, it becomes increasingly important to understand the environment which affects these practices for an effective development activity. The key drivers in software development outsourcing, which mostly affects the effectiveness of the development, have evolved through the past experiences of organizations, while outsourcing their projects to companies in other countries.

Offshoring of software development is relatively new, and the various procedural aspects in this activity, such as, quality control, project management, faster development cycle, etc. have yet to be evolved fully, which understandably would provide a better confidence level. Constant research work is going on for the success of software development outsourcing. This is being done through understanding of the various models, while investigating into the factors of its success. These models have evolved through the interactions between the onsite and the outsourced organizations, and that’s how the learning curve has been derived out of years of experience. In order to make outsourcing a success, the offshore sourcing needs to be taken up as a serious effort, with the stakeholders needing to learn more quickly through the experiences that they have had, bringing out the best practices that could be achieved. Offshoring projects involve various socio-cultural processes inherent in the system of knowledge transfer, including the explicit and implicit, formal and informal exchanges of knowledge between the onsite and the offshore companies.

Some of the emphatic declarations that have been so far derived at, from the experience and previous results out of software development outsourcing, provide an understanding of the variables affecting the success of offshore software development. Some of these assertions include:

• The essential components of offshore software development success are the various dimension of the project itself, which are on-time completion, within-budget completion, costs and effort, meeting system requirements, system quality, user satisfaction, system use, and net system benefits.
• The process performance is a measure of assessing the functioning of the offshore partner. These performances could be classified as on-time and within-the-budget completion of the project by the offshore company, effectiveness of communication, etc. The performance of the software product implemented is also a measure in assessing the efficiency and capability of the offshore company.
• Understanding of the project being outsourced is one of the vital aspects of any project success. The offshore company would need to have adequate relationship management and engagement staff, who would be skilled to understand the process of outsourcing, there-by helping the onshore company to navigate through the complexity.
• A disciplined software project management is success by itself.
• The major issue regarding communication between the onsite organization and its offshore partner company has been identified as the most important aspect in any outsourcing of software development projects.

In outsourcing your software development, you would need to take care of the complex processes that it involves. These are further complicated by the ever changing business scenario, when requirements still remain fluid. Offshoring a software development project is not simply handing over a set of documents to the partner company. It needs a careful interactive session between the onsite and offshore company, discussing the project threadbare, providing the required detailed information possible for the project to be taken up by the partner company. The offshore company on the other hand would need to comprehend fully regarding the project implementation, taking into account all the possible pitfalls that may come up during execution.

The time zone separation, the cultural differences, communication, etc are all pitfalls in any outsourcing of projects. In addition, the geographical boundaries, and the changing definitions and relationships in the development effort are all part of the game of offshore software development.

Related posts:

1. Challenges in Offshore Software Development
2. Establishing and Managing Risk factors in Offshore Software Development
3. Tools to Help Manage Offshore Software Development

Organizations have been distributing their work all over the world, outsourcing their software development projects to different countries. The motivations of these organizations, as well as the process they follow in distributing projects, continues to evolve. There have been significant management process changes adopted by companies in dealing with offshore companies and their software teams.

Offshore software development offers several benefits, but at the same time distribution of projects to distributed team of software engineers offer more challenges than the collected team. The question is how to address these issues, and as these evolve, there would be finally a set of critical factors that would ensure the success of offshore software development.

The trends in the market:

There is a continued global expansion of companies, and this expansion has resulted in distribution of their teams around the world in several ways, whether be it offshoring, acquiring, partnering, or outsourcing. As this practice becomes prevalent, there is a constant evolvement of approaches and practices, taking the offshoring to a matured level.

The decision factor:

Many organizations are moving their work to one single destination, and frequently in India. In the present days there are trends in transferring projects to China, and the Eastern European countries. In transferring the work, the main motive was the cost factor, where the decision to move offshore was influenced mainly by the availability of the skill at a much cheaper rate than the US or Western European countries.

Organizations in the US and Western Europe are increasingly setting up their own development centres in several locations in the world. The decision to set up such center in Asia, and Eastern European countries are mostly motivated by the availability of the right skill at low rates, and there are other motivation factors which has prompted organizations to move offshore.

Having centers all over the world, organizations now have a pool of talents from which they can draw from. Having set up the teams in different time zones, the organizations can now have extended working hours. The team in the eastern zone hands over the job to the western team at the end of their day. The team in the western region starts to work on the same project, there-by extending the time extensively, saving cost and time of completion.

There is increasing number of outsourcing providers growing in the world, which has made outsourcing popular for quite some time. Initially, the organizations used to select outsourcing vendors who made sense at that time. The decision could also have also have been based on the project itself, which was perhaps found to be suitable for outsourcing, or the organizations might have based their decision on such projects which were short of funding.

The pitfalls:

In order to successfully accomplish project completion, the offshore companies need to be flexible in adapting to new methodologies, life-cycles, and specifications in order to meet the outsourced project requirements. In each case, the methodology applied for projects are usually different. There are other factors which may affect the offshore software development processes, and these could be the existing communication and co-ordination variables, cultural differences, requirement deficiencies, relationship management, quality process, project management tools for project evaluation, and more importantly the turn-over of skilled people attached to the project.

Related posts:

1. Establishing and Managing Risk factors in Offshore Software Development
2. Offshore Software Development Dynamics
3. Using Open Source in Offshore Software Development

For the record, this example is not intended to highlight efficiencies and/or deficiencies in outsourced article writing. Also, it is not my intention to focus on India and the Philippines. I have friends from both countries.

Instead, it is provided as an example of an article written by an offshore outsourced provider. Outsourcing article writing seems to be hyped lately as a way to add original content to your website. But I haven’t seen any examples of what you can expect. Keep in mind, this is just one example. It might help you determine if offshore article writing is something that might work for you. Let me know if you want me to post some more examples.

—

Human Resource Outsourcing in India

Human resource is the latest kind of outsourcing in India. The process of human resource outsourcing is for an Indian company to locally recruit talents and managed them for you
as if you are the owner of a particular business set up for you by this company in India.
If for example you are an IT company in the US, this company set up for you will of course be a mixture of web developers, and other IT professionals. You can run this IT
company from the US with the local company who set it up for you as your manager. They will run this company for you, from payroll to talent recruiting and everything else.

This human resource that you have outsourced in India can very well compliment your IT
company in the US. They can address any production deficiency of your company and can also provide you the needed manpower backup during peak season. What is more important is that you will be paying your Indian personnel very low salaries compared to your US employees. Outsourcing in India of human resource will prove a very valuable
investments. This new trend in outsourcing in India is getting a lot of interest not only in the US but in Europe as well.

The good thing about this kind of outsourcing in India is you can avail yourself of talented Indian IT engineers and website professionals who can give your business a lot of added value at very low cost to you. And since the Indian government is supportive of this kind of undertaking, you can be sure of no red tape and other government hassles that are attendant to other Asian countries. Besides, you will be able to communicate with all your Indian personnel in fluent English, enabling you to share and discuss all things that pertains to the operation of your outsourced human resourced undertaking..

The groundwork for outsourcing in India has been made many years ago when the Indian government decided to use the English language as their second language and use English as the medium of instruction in all schools. This made the Indians proficient in the use of the language which is helping them now in the outsourcing business. Their most notable accomplishment in the human resource outsourcing business because of their English proficiency is in the proliferation of call centers in many cities of India. If you are in the US and you call a company to inquire a particular product or service that they are offering, chances are an Indian call center representative will be the one answering your inquiry. Most companies in the US are outsourcing their incoming and even their out going calls from countries in Asia, most notably the Philippines and India.

Related posts:

1. Accounting Outsourcing in India
2. Effective Outsourcing
3. Offshore – Outsourcing

‘The true potential of outsourcing is not being achieved and we are still seeing a focus on a narrow remit of labour arbitrage and cost reduction. Overall our survey shows that the emphasis on cost reduction and access to a vendor’s skilled workers reveals a procurement-oriented mind-set that takes a narrow view of the potential benefits of an outsourcing relationship. In short, companies are aiming too low.’

I echo these thoughts. In my experience, you’re asking for long term headaches when the outsourcing strategy is based solely on costing costs.

Related posts:

1. Offshore Software Outsourcing and reasons why offshore deals shatter
2. Factors Influencing the Outsourcing Decision
3. True Benefits of Outsourcing Software Development

In particular, I found the top countries breakout particularly interesting. Recently, I discovered my company has developers on 6 continents.

What do you think of oDesk statistics?

Related posts:

1. More Reasons than Cost When Outsourcing Software Development
2. Globalization Mashup for Tech Skills, Rates
3. Offshore Software Development – Country Comparison

The appointed Broad of Directors of a public listed company is responsible for carrying on the effective operations of such an organization on behalf of the shareholders. It is the Board of Directors who takes the decision relating to outsourcing, keeping in mind that the shareholders are interested in return on investments, and/or social obligations. Even with the Board taking strategic decisions on matters of the company, the shareholders reserve the right to state the views for or against the decisions taken, and let the Board know regarding their opinion. In case of outsourcing, the shareholders can make their views known to the Board if they are against that.

The difficulty in languages:

There are obvious difficulties when differences in languages and culture come up in outsourcing a project. This is particularly the case where such projects are outsourced to region where English is not the first language, and the country is culturally different. The quality of the software product affects greatly when the project details are not comprehended by the software team in the offshore company.

Often the words spoken are not understood by the onsite teams. The kind of grammar used, the pronunciations and accents, and different phraseology make it difficult to relate any information that needs to be conveyed. The clues that arise out of face to face meetings are evidently missing, resulting in complete misunderstanding of the entire conversation.

Social responsibility:

Outsourcing, especially offshore, does result in lower paid workers. On the contrary, it is argued that it takes away the benefit of employment from most of the local people.

Outsourcing affects service quality:

The measure of quality produced by the offshore company is usually measured through a service level agreement, SLA in short. This is included in the outsourcing contract. This is an important aspect in any outsourced jobs, and poorly defined SLA, or no inclusion at all, might result in loss of quality output. Even if you have defined SLA, you need to be very particular in its preparation, for it is the only way that you can measure quality of the product produced. SLA puts the real measurement of objective of the outsourcing contract.

There are different views regarding the quality measured. According to the CEO of the organization, the product might be perceived as a lower quality but acceptable to meet the business needs at the right price. The management team might think that the quality has detonated compared to the previous project. As far as the end user is concerned, he might think that the product is well within the SLA, but is still inadequate. As regards the offshore company, they might feel that the product meets every aspect of the SLA, meeting every definition regardless of the perception of others.

Customer satisfaction is the only way that quality of any product could be measured. This is determined through questionnaires especially designed to bring out the customer opinion of the product, which is considered to be an unbiased view.

Offshore company qualifications:

There is every possibility that by outsourcing company is replacing their qualified staff with others who is under-skilled, or having different non-equivalent qualifications.

Related posts:

1. Example of Outsourcing Article Writing for Your Website
2. Reactions to Offshore Outsourcing
3. Offshore Software Development Dynamics

There are uncertainties surrounding these debates, and yet business executives are routinely labeled as interested in the offshore philosophy simply because they want to save money. Organizations are under pressure to deliver software development with cost savings and return on investments, with qualifying increase in profitability and shareholder value. Though there is no denial that technology has played a great part in the success of the majority of the business initiatives, there is a tendency of viewing IT resources as commodities. This tendency is drawn to the offshore philosophy by the sheer rock-bottom development rates, with the hourly offshore rates standing at one-third to one-half of the domestic rates. From this standpoint, offshore looks to be a brighter prospect.

As offshore takes a leap, the IT leaders are slowly learning the cost of trusting and the risks involved with offshore software development.

Any step taken towards offshore software development should be viewed as a major commitment of time and money. Going for offshore partnering is a serious enough proposition. It should be analyzed in the same way as one would do while going for an acquisition of an overseas company.

Practically, the offshore concept lets you acquire the foreign IT firm that would form an essential integral part of your company for years to come. Any company in the US wanting to acquire a firm in India, China, or Belarus would do so after a deep analysis and understanding of many complex business issues.

It is not quite a straight forward process in carrying out an offshore partnership. It requires the understanding of many aspects of the project, including establishing the relationship between the onsite and offshore companies, industry, value proposition, products and services, competitors, processes, organizational structure, and much more to enable offshore partnership to produce results.

While it is costly to set up an IT development center in the US, and the same is true for the offshore establishments, many of the offshore firms have their infrastructure in place, barring few upgrades, additional hardware, and unique software packages for the project to be developed.

The basic communication and project management administrative tools, such as the phone systems, VPN, email, Instant Messenger, audio and video conferencing equipment, etc. need to be addressed, without which significant risk in implementation of the project will not be accounted for in the plan.

There is a vital risk matter that needs to be considered in offshore project development tasks. There are much macro-level issues that cannot be ignored when proposing an offshore software development project. In proposing such matters, you would need to look into the legal issues in the offshore country. There will be political and regulatory laws to be concerned with, and intellectual property risks and natural disasters need to be taken into account.

As you prepare to analyze the proposal for offshore your project you would need to ask yourself questions not found in domestic software development outsourcing:

“What is the potential impact on your project and your business of a material change in the political, regulatory or legal environment in your offshore vendor’s country?”

“How will the labor cost estimates swing if there is a significant change in the value of the US dollar abroad?”

Related posts:

1. Challenges in Offshore Software Development
2. Small Business Opportunities in Offshore Software Development
3. New British Law Might Soften Offshore Outsourcing Demand