Rethinking your whole project structure to work with contractors

Problem

Working at Motorola as a Product Manager, we faced a situation where we could, for the same cost, hire two people in San Francisco OR work with a team of six contractors based in India. The project was based around building a content management system we leveraged to push news and multimedia content to user's devices. At that time, it was hard for us to find people in-house who were good at UI and it was difficult to get contractors getting up-to-speed on our back end system. It was a hard call to make, as both solutions had their own upsides and downsides.

Actions taken

Instead of going for one solution or the other, we tried to get the best of both worlds - but it wasn't possible in the current state of the project. What if you could restructure your project to fit how it will be made? That's exactly what we did. We decided to only have one person in San Francisco, who would work on an API layer, and to hire an offshore team of contractors to work on the UI components (which would eventually interface with our API). By redesigning the project's structure, we managed to have people in-house working on the core value of the product without the hassle of getting them up-to-speed AND leveraged a skilled workforce on the UI part of the project.

Lessons learned

From my experience, successfully outsourced projects happen when they follow a few basic rules:

1. They are well defined. There is a start and a clear end.
2. There is no (or very little) ramp up time - you don't want to have a full-time engineer managing the contractors if they could have done the job himself in the time it takes to get the contractors up-to-speed.
3. They're not IP related. Keep the knowledge in-house. Contractors offer a very interesting option for software development, so if you're deciding on working with them, rethink your project structure to benefit as much as possible from them.

"We decided to only have one person in San Francisco, who would work on an API layer, and to hire an offshore team of contractors to work on the UI components."