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How good is your consultant

06 02 09 - 06:07 “Outsourcing” to India or China is a very lucrative term for finance departments, executives, venture capitalists and Wallstreet especially in the context of tech companies. But there are myriad of problems to deal with in making an outsourced project a success, and many of you who have worked at least with one such project can give a long list of such problems. Companies are now trying to find a successful formula to make such projects a success and those companies which succeeded in such projects are trying hard to repeat their success. How good is your consultant?
“Outsourcing” to India or China is a very lucrative term for finance departments, executives, venture capitalists and Wallstreet especially in the context of tech companies. But there are myriad of problems to deal with in making an outsourced project a success, and many of you who have worked at least with one such project can give a long list of such problems. Companies are now trying to find a successful formula to make such projects a success and those companies which succeeded in such projects are trying hard to repeat their success. I have seen and worked with many outsourced projects -some of them succeeded while most of them were abandoned in the middle or failed miserably. I can also present a huge list of issues and recommended solutions while considering outsourcing. But recently I started thinking about the core reasons behind many of these issues. Here I am trying to analyze one of such issues.
Number of years of experience in the industry is one of the widely accepted measures of maturity, skills and competivenes of a professional. It is like number of hours pilots put on cockpits of aircrafts. One of issues with outsourced consultants is the mismatch in the stated experience of consultants you get to work and the actual level of experience -compared to your in-house experts- you realize while working with them. Based on experience some project managers apply discounts on those experience level even up to 50% before the start of the project. This prompted me to think why such differences in experience levels exist in the experts provided by my outsourced company. When I am offered with 4 consultants with 5 years of experience; in the US standards it is reasonable to assume that I got 4 consultants with 2 to 3 years of experience. If you don’t do such assumptions you will be out of the game even before the project has started. The question is why such differences exist?
One of the easy reasons I can come with is the greedy management of the service company who tries to oversell their consultants or even the consultants themselves trying to oversell them for short term gains and they are unaware of the long term impacts of such acts. This may be common among lower tier service providers. You can see this tendency in some of smaller US based outsourcing companies too. But is this the only reason for such differences?
Another theory I have come up with is the separation between university and industry in those countries. I took my bachelors degree from a University in India. The gap between school and industry was very wide – or some time they are even on the polar opposites- in India at that time. There are too many reasons for that, first the surplus of manpower and higher unemployment rate allowed companies to be very choosy in their talent hunt and they did not have to approach schools to recruit most talented graduate, but talented graduates approached them. They did not have much stake in the education system. At most some cash rich companies would provide some financial assistants to top tier schools. On the other side, most of the teaching staffs were incompetent because once they are employed by the school, job is secure for rest of their life and there weren’t any competition for the teaching post from outside the country. For the convenience of teaching and program management staffs even the curriculum was structured around theory, but not applications. The curriculum is hardly changed, to avoid the administrative cost. As a result once you are out of the school, all you have is skill to learn but not to apply. So as a fresher your first years are spent on getting used to the industry, process and applications. A computer science graduate from an average US school is at least one year ahead of a graduate from an average Indian school. The good news is this is changing now. With all the companies compete for top talents in India; they are into campuses of even less reputed schools and pumping money into schools to prepare the talent pools they need. Not long ago one of the high ranking executives of a top rated service company in India called for total makeover to the Indian educational system. On the other side heavy lucrative deals attract professionals in the industry and teaching professionals from North America and UK into campuses of India for teaching and coaching. I know couple of professors recently worked in India for some of the graduate programs there. I am very excited to see these changes and these changes are not only good for India but also for the whole global economy. It may take a few more years to see the results of such changes. Until then I guess I will have to more closely scrutinize the skills and experience of consultants I am getting.