Vitaliy wrote:

> We find ourselves in these sorts of situations all the time, yet our
> experience with outsourcing is all negative.
 >
> 100% negative.
> 
> Have you ever worked with contractors/been a contractor yourself? 
> 
> Vitaliy

I've worked on both sides of the fence here.  In one company, the 
management hired consultants and some did great jobs while some did not 
do so great.  Usually, the "bad" ones were the result of trying to get 
some job done that insiders knew was very hard or impossible to do and 
wouldn't touch it so the management hired an outsider.  The outsiders 
had less knowledge and in those projects, were doomed.  My take on it 
was that management was to blame for the failures.

Later working as an "outsider" doing consulting with another person, we 
avoided the jobs that were so ill defined that success was going to be a 
moving target, if possible at all.  All the jobs we did usually ended up 
with repeat work from the same client.

Aside from the crazies who wanted perpetual motion machines built, the 
people we avoided always had the notion that our part of the job was the 
bone-head simple part that should take a week or two at most.  They had 
done the hard part, the creative part, the inventing part.  Now it just 
needed to be "fleshed out" a bit.  People who came to us and said "we 
don't know how to do this and need your help" were the ones we would 
gladly work for and had the best success with.

I'm tempted to say that if you outsource a lot and it is 100% negative, 
then you need to look in the mirror.  Dozens of people on this list work 
entirely as "outsource engineering" and do so with complete success. 
This would indicate that outsourcing can be profitable for all 
concerned.  So if your experience is otherwise, you need to think about 
how you go about your business maybe.  This is just a guess based on 
nothing more than what you stated above coupled with my experience.

YMMV.





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