How can you benefit from cooperation with me? I will be very brief, here are 2 simple reasons:

1. To save your time. I already know answers to question that you should dig long to answer.
2. To save your money. There are different ways to get the same result. Some of them cost more, some less. I can help you select the best.

There is pretty common misconception that technologically advanced start-ups have to be developed in-house. Proponents of this theory refer to IP breach riscs, poor quality of code and need to keep core competence in house. While the problems mentioned may have place, it is more problem of wrong approach to offshore outsourcing.
Recently I’ve read a great discussion about this topic at Silicon Beach group, I will quote Phil Morle, a guy from Pollenizer (start-up accelerator from Sydney) who made a great contribution to this discussion:

I believe there are two important dimensions for a startup: speed of learning and cost.
Speed of learning. The faster an engineering team can iterate upon measured customer impact of their work on the product, the more likely the product will succeed. This means that the team needs to understand what they are building and there needs to be systems in place to take action as the work develops. If your choice of team (local or offshore) depends upon a big spec, you are less likely to succeed. We have needed to:
- Implement common tools for fast distributed communication. Our weapons of choice: Jira, Confluence, Yammer and Skype.
- Implement processes for rapid communication. We have daily text huddles in Skype, weekly detailed sprint planning calls, weekly
sprints, continuous integration to staging servers with every commit, unit testing, feature flipping (http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/)
- Spend face time. We go every 2 months to India but you may only need to go once. It makes a HUGE difference to get to know the people. You can work faster and with more honesty.
- Start every projects with a big session to describe what we are trying to build – what the goal is as well as some of our initial
ideas for execution…
Cost. Developing with an offshore provides a required economy for a startup. You can put on bigger teams to get things done faster. You can flex the team up and down to be responsive to the inevitably volatile world of your business. There are some things to be careful of though. I’ll say this, if someone is half the price and the work takes twice as long, that person is not cheaper.
Hiring an offshore team to anything material is a big commitment.
The worst mistake I have seen people make is:
- Look on the web or oDesk or Freelancer for a team
- Hire them based on price
- Send them a spec
- Wait for the deliverable
- And wait
- And wait
I’ve seen it happen a lot.
You can outsource the engineering effort but you can’t outsource the accountability for getting it done. Spend time on it daily… hourly, like the team is in the same room as you. Treat them as mates because its easy to think someone remote is an idiot and its probably because you don’t understand each other’s context.

There is not much can be added, probably expect that opion about developers from Eastern Europe, whick is quite pleasant to read since I specialize in outsourcing to Ukraine and Russia:

I think the quality of coders in Eastern Europe far exceeds India or the Philippines

So if somebody tell you that offshore outsourcing doesn’t work, the answer is ‘You just can’t cook it right!’.

I have recently got an extensive outsourcing  industry study, conducted this year by CEEOA. The research based on the data collected from 246 companies, working in 16 CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) countries. That is very long document with lot of useful information and today I write about what’s going on with rates.

The research notes, that rates declined a little during the end of 2008 – begin of 2009 as a response to GFC and a measure to retain old clients and win new contract in very hard economic situation, but later on start to gradually grow again.

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Another good presentation I got via Digital Sport Summit participation: Anthonty Harrison about use of Mobile web and native iPhone and Blackberry applications in marketing for sport organization.

Presentation from Nick Marvin, CEO of basketball team Perth Wildcats about marketing and social media for sport clubs.

There is a good article about economical impact of outsourcing and what potential buyer should expect on Outsourcing.com web site.

I’ll quote that work conclusion:

Full text is available at www.outsourcing.com

Vague requirement documentation is most often reason of fail in software development projects. One cause of such requirement problems is the language we use when write our documents. Issues and background that are very evident for one person, can be completely new and different for another, so it is creatical to use Elaborative, not Restrictive language in requirement documentation.

An article of Mark Monteleone is a great illustration of how that problem appears and what can be done to avoid it. Must read to all business analyst and other people working with requirements

Obviously for Australian companies, Russia is not a traditional outsourcing destination. Why it make a sense to think about sending your IT project to Russia?

In the begin I’ll try to downgrade couple myths about Russia and then present some reasons, why Russia should be considered for software projects outsourcing.

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Today results appears in the University online system, I have successfully passed all my subjects. As I presumed, best results was on Managerial Economics and Data&Decision, others are also not so bad.
So right now I can relax (at least with study related issues) until the begin of February.

So, I have moved to Melbourne Australia. The process was not easy, but now it is done and I’ll live here at least 2 years, while study in Melbourne Business School. My study will start next week and so far I am enjoyed my life in Australia.

In couple weeks I will move to Melbourne, Australia. I will study in Melbourne Business School for 2 years, obtain MBA degree.

I invested significant efforts and money to that venture and hope that it worth my endeavours. My family will movve with me, 2 years is to long time to live apart.

So I am very exited about my life in Australia, it should be fun