The MGS Blog

Friday, January 14, 2022

We have a problem Heuston (case)

Tom runs a product concept and design company that handles high-level web and marketing activities while outsourcing development. Although his business is located in the digital campus beside Heuston Station he claims there are just too few (affordable) software engineers in the Irish market for a small firm like his to build up its own development capability, especially as much of the work can be sourced online. He contracts software implementation and delivery to a small number of trusted outside firms that he has worked with over the years. Tom handles client facing interaction, gathering the requirements, and sourcing delivery from his contacts. He thinks of the software code merely one facet of the business, as something that just 'gets the job done';
"yes code is intellectual property but you can't be precious about code. For me it's the relationship with my client, building up a joint understanding of how we want a 'thing' to work. To be honest I couldn't care less about the code as something I own".
The CMS project was a nice earner in 2005 but now five years later, it is becoming a bit of a headache. The original developer had moved to America but passed the source code to Tom who in turn contracted a firm in India to maintain and develop it. The Indian firm was founded by Suhas and a number of partners who were IT professionals and had worked together previously in Europe. Suhas had taken on the CMS contract almost as a favor to Tom and the original developer, a personal friend. As it happened neither Suhas nor the developers on his team had ever met Tom in person or dealt directly with Tom's clients (CMS's customers and users). Tom managed all contact with India, usually through Suhas but occasionally contacting the developers assigned to the CMS by email, Skype or phone.

Pune, called the Oxford of the East by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, is home to many high tech, consultancy and software companies centred around a vibrant community of universities, research institutes and colleges. Pune competes for international software outsourcing business with other locations in India and across the World. However Suhas's view has always been that Indian engineers should innovate and add value, rather than just take part in an international outsourcing race to the bottom in terms of cost or manpower. He founded the firm on principles of integrity and fairness...
"knowledge has power, but it takes time to acquire and it is only useful if it is shared and used!" 
"I always feel that we can not be threat to our clients because the end customer always prefers to have a local company to deal with which can outsource the work to outside world."
The CMS project has a history, characterised by periods of intense involvement (development and delivery work) followed by gaps of months at a time with little or no contact. The engineers who had worked on it over the years were often overwhelmed, picking up where the project had left off and working on fixes or new features with few opportunities for feedback with the end customer. A release could be delivered after which it might take Tom a week or more to report back on the quality or its acceptance. This sort of stop-start, delayed back and forwards was not typical for Suhas's other contracts. Suhas felt that the CMS was a perfectly good application that already satisfied the requirements, however Tom's point of view was that the customer was always right, if the customer was unhappy then it was a bug and it had to be fixed. For Tom, just understanding a customer's problem took time and effort, explaining it to Suhas or one of his engineers complicated things further. In spite of this Tom was concerned to keep the customer at 'arms length' from India, after all, if they dealt directly with each other what was the point of having Tom in the relationship? Suhas felt there could never be an issue of 'going behind' Tom, he reasoned that Tom owned the CMS, it was Tom's property. What Suhas wanted was for his engineers to communicate directly with the end-user so they could clarify the requirements, satisfy them completely, identify and fix bugs, get on with the job and get paid.


CMS: Content Management System(s)

Content management systems are applications for managing and structuring information and data accessed and delivered over the Internet. The term CMS is often synonymous with 'portal' or web site however several crucial features distinguish a CMS from other internet services including: publication workflow, fine grained user roles and privileges, extensive data/object types (event, wiki, news, chat, blog, slideshow, video, audio, forms, mail, surveys, RSS), TTW (Through The Web) administration and use, extendible via Javascript and other programming methods.
A general overview of different CMSs is available at the cmsmatrix.org. cmsmatrix.org enables feature comparisons between the many CMS product/applications available.