Work Posting!!

The Southern Division IT group met in San Antonio to discuss Vision 2010. We came up with a Vision 2010 for the IT group. One of the main items in our Vision is to increase our percentage contribution of the Southern Divisions Net Profit from 4% to 10%. This is a huge jump in profit for us meaning we will need to over double our size (all things being equal).

I was discussing this with Jay Pandya over the weekend, and he had a fantastic idea. Instead of struggling to hire 30 new people in the Southern Division, we hire 3 or 4 very experienced people that want to lead a team of developers in our Weston India office. For every 10 people in India, we should hire atleast 1 person to manage the projects being sent to those new developers.

One possible way to handle projects in this manner is as follows: When we begin a new project, have two leads; project manager, technical lead, etc, at the project kickoff and requirements gathering meetings. One of these two leads would then head to India to be the initial point of contact for the team in India, while the other lead stayed in the states as the primary contact for the client and the development team. This way, the development team being in India is transparent to the client.

The benefits of this method is that we would not have to handle all the overhead of employing 30 or 40 new people or the cost of hiring that many new employees. Jay said this is the structure that others companies he has worked for use to manage projects in India.

I also spoke with a gentleman from another company on the plane that briefly described how his company manages their projects in India. He said that they perform UI and kernal development in the states, and use their India team to develop all the rest.

There are a myriad of other ways to utilize our group India, and I will keep you guys informed of other ideas I come across including pros and cons for each. Please feel free to post comments discussing these ideas as well.