How to get good off-shore developers – Part 2
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Off-shoing your web-development is a great way to save money and, if you are bootstrapping a small start-up, it could be the perfect strategy to hang on to more equity and delay financing. However off-shoring your development is also fraught with risks, it is far harder to manage your development and communicate ideas, so it is vital to take proper steps to protect yourself. In this post I continue describing the system I’ve used several times in order to ensure that I get developers who are motivated, technically capable and trust-worthy.
You’ll find stages 1 and 2 discussed here.
Step 3 – Send the developers you’ve found a “Request for Information”
A Request for Information (or RFI) is a questionnaire to help you short-list developers. The objective of the RFI is to enable you to decide which developers can deliver your project in the right sort of price range. Your RFI should at least gather the following information:
- Hourly rates for different staff types
- Which currencies the developer can raise invoices in
- Whether they are prepared to set a fixed cost for the project (you want a fixed cost, right?)
- Between 3 and 5 customer references
- Information about the company (how long has it been running, how many people it employs)
- Information on their typical project (how big it is, how long it lasts)
- The development methodology employed and development technologies supported
- Whether they have a design house
- Their preferred development technology
- Any technology certifications which they may have
- A “difficult technical problem” which is related to your project, ask the developers to sketch out how they would solve it
I’ve included an example RFI in the documentation bank to help get you started.
When asking for references, try and get projects which are similar to yours. Also get a reference for a company which is physically near you and then arrange to meet up with them for a coffee and a chat.
Your RFI should also tell the developers all the key deadlines for the selection process. It ensures that the developer knows where they stand at all times, and it gives you targets and deadlines to meet yourself. When you issue it give the vendors at least 2 weeks to respond and an opportunity to ask you questions.
If you are worried about controlling your IP, then there’s no need to discuss what your actual business is in the RFI. However, you might want to describe in broad terms the type of business you are launching, or refer to some similar companies.
When you send the RFI out, update the vendor dashboard which you set up at the start of the process.
Note that not every company will respond to your RFI. Some companies will respond but fail to answer the final question, some companies will send you back documentation packs which probably contain the answers, but they’ve not bothered to put them into your format. All these companies should be immediately dropped from the list.
Step 4 – Short-list the developers
Two weeks after you’ve issued your RFI you should have all the responses you are going to get. I tend not to bother chasing any companies who don’t reply to the RFI and just stick with those that do. Your next step is to short-list the developers, you want to work through the responses until you have 4-7 companies to take through to the next stage.
Before you start short-listing the developers, you need to think about what your ideal company is. You might want to work with a small company, or you might be looking for a larger company with ISO or CMM certification, you may have a particular development methodology in mind, or you might want your system built with a particular technology, etc. Collate all these thoughts to help piece together what you are looking for.
You are then ready to start “the sift”. First stage is to remove any companies which just aren’t right. Personally when reading through these responses I arrange them into three piles: yes, no, and questions. I then ask the questions and update. I continue to do this until I have only a yes pile and a no pile.
Remember to always check the references, this is one of the best signals of quality company. If they are in your country, arrange to go and see them, otherwise drop them an email. You want to know whether the developer delivered on time and to budget, if they still use them, if they’ve given them any new work and if they’d recommend them.
Keep working the list until you get between 4-7 companies. It is important that you don’t take too many vendors through to the short-list round as you don’t want large numbers of companies knowing what you want building. If you don’t have enough, approach more companies. Finally, ensure that you feedback to all the companies involved (good news and bad) and update the vendor dashboard to so can keep track of where each company is.
In the next post we’ll look at how to get a price for the development and how to select which companies is going to build your business.
