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How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us: Page 6 of 10

You might assume that, given our dismal experience with offshore development, we have written off this model completely. Not so. Offshore may still hold promise as a way to cost-effectively extend our current team.

What would we do differently? Instead of relying on the vendor to institute the offshore processes and team, we would set that up ourselves. Ideally, we would have a developer (probably an Indian) from our internal team relocate to India to build and manage a competent offshore team, perhaps within leased space at an existing development facility.

Another lesson we learned the hard way is that fixed-bid offshore projects tend to misalign the vendor's interests with ours by placing undue emphasis on cost and time line while sacrificing quality and customer focus. Because we care about what the code looks like (this vendor's on-site liaison and account executive admitted to me that they do much better with fixed-bid projects when the customer doesn't inspect their code), we would have been better off using a time and materials arrangement, which would have given us more control over every part of the process.

Finally, next time I would pay more attention to my employees' concerns. Even before the project started, several employees expressed doubts about the quality of offshore code and predicted they would end up redoing it themselves. Turns out they were right.

Wesley Bertch is director of software systems at Life Time Fitness. Send your comments on this article to him at [email protected].