SharePoint Consultants – What You See May Not Be What You Get
I am not bigoted, nor am I jingoistic.
It seems important to say that right up front. (If anyone who knows me well thinks that statement isn’t true, then I’ve got some work to do. Momma didn’t raise me that way.) I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time now, and I think it’s a hard one to write without saying those two things. I don’t want this to come of as whining or anger. It’s just some stuff I’ve noticed and thought about that I think some other people ought to think about, too.
Over the last 6 to 9 months, I’ve noticed that more and more of the questions I’m getting about SharePoint are coming from overseas, whether it be through the contact form on my blog or in the forums I participate in. Many people probably may not realize it, but when you post a comment to a blog (at least a WordPress blog with moderated comments like mine) the owner can see the IP address you were using when you entered it. So I’m not just reacting to names I don’t usually hear at the local Wal-Mart. Refer to my first statement at the top.
Now this is somewhat to be expected, as SharePoint Developers are becoming a commodity just like everything does. Yes, that’s a sad thing, and I strongly feel that it’s a bad idea with this particular type of technology in most cases. To me, working on a technology platform which exists to facilitate collaboration requires a very hands-on, collaborative working style – one which is hard to create from thousands of miles away.
But there are some other problems in all this and it raises some further questions in my mind.
Should I be helping these folks?
Of course I do, and I probably won’t stop. As my ex-colleague Mauro Cardarelli used to tell me (paraphrased): "What’s good for SharePoint is good for me."
However, especially over the last year or two, as people I know have been looking for work with SharePoint (as have I), it has made me pause a little. If the overseas folks are busy but we aren’t, should I be spending more time helping the locals get good gigs or helping someone in another country do the basics? Many people feel this way about the forum stuff in general. If they know the answer, shouldn’t they guard that knowledge? That, to me, is an old school way of thinking and working that doesn’t hold up anymore. It’s more suited to the 1950s than it is to the twenty-first century.
So I’m not really averse to helping – in fact I really enjoy it – but there are some really difficult cultural differences to deal with. It really annoys me to get an email with a full business problem spelled out, followed by a statement like: "Give a solution for this as soon as possible." Maybe it’s OK somewhere to demand a solution for nothing, but at some point I have other things to do, just like everyone else. I also am a consultant who gets paid to do this stuff for my clients. So it’s really important for those strangers out there to realize that I and many others help because we choose to, not because we have to. We don’t work for Microsoft just because we answer questions on the MSDN forums, we don’t have unlimited time and energy, we aren’t impervious to rudeness, etc. The vast majority of people who ask for help are quite pleasant and respectful, but that small percentage who aren’t can turn it sour.
What are the companies which are hiring these offshore folks really getting?
Now I’m not anti-outsourcing or offshoring. I’m a consultant, so I pretty much have to agree with at least the former. To me there are two main reasons to hire outside help: economics and expertise. (Isn’t it kute that they both start with ‘e’?)
Clearly the offshoring idea is all about economics. I don’t care what anyone tells you about their motivations or how everyone at the overseas firm went to the best engineering university in their own country, it’s all about the money. You just can’t compare the rates that a good developer in the US makes versus a good developer in many other countries.
The other reason – expertise – is all about filling in a skill set for a defined period of time to accomplish something that you otherwise don’t have the skills to do. This is the type of consulting I like to do: go in, get something hard done, educate the client about how to do it themselves the next time, and move on. (Sometimes I have to force the training thing a little more than my clients want me to. I really believe it’s a part of my job and I try to be a stickler about it.) With offshoring where the folks on the other end don’t know what they are doing, this is certainly not the angle.
So, organizations that are trying to save money are hiring offshore help, but they may not be getting the expertise they need. Some of these questions I see are just basic: not even hard to answer. (Inside tip: Want to earn 17000 points on the MSDN forums like I have? You can just answer the easy ones, and there are lots of them.) So there’s a cost saving, but the people doing the work may not really know what they are doing. (I’m not saying that’s the case for everyone. There are very talented people all over the planet.)
So is the cost savings a sham, too? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone in and ripped out someone else’s code like so much poison ivy because it is really bad and doesn’t even work to meet the business requirements. This isn’t stylistic stuff, like Middle Tier versus managed code, this is just horribly badly done work. Sometimes it’s offshored and sometimes it’s companies right here in the Boston area who have done the work. so geography isn’t necessarily a predictor of quality.
So my point here is that you’d damn well better know what you are going to get when you hire an outside firm. Be *very* aware of the old bait and switch, and also remember that it’s almost unheard of for that nice sales person to be the one who’s going to actually do the work. Someone, somewhere is going to do it and you deserve to know who they are and what they know. If the people who actually end up working on your stuff are the ones asking some of these questions I get, then believe you me, you may save a little money this quarter but it’s going to be far harder to fix it while it’s up and running that it would have been to do it right in the first place.
So, first of all, I apologize to all of the talented people out there, anywhere, who may fell lumped into something here that they shouldn’t be. Also, I’m not writing this due to any particular interaction or individual’s action. It’s just a pattern of things I’ve seen which I’ve thought about for a long time.
What do *you* think?
Referring back to Dave Coleman’s comment, on a “SharePoint consultant that has never seen a Publishing site” – is part of the problem one of definitions ?
Perhaps organizations or individuals should be selling their services as “SharePoint Collaboration” consultant, or “SharePoint Intranet” consultant, or “SharePoint Technical Architecture” consultant etc etc.
I have been a ‘consultant’ before, I would never have labelled myself as a SharePoint consultant per se, but I worked for many large global blue chip clients, designing intranets to be built on SharePoint. So we are talking strategy, design (but not detailed graphic design), Information Architecture, governance, best practice etc. However my skill set would not allow you to plonk me in front of the Stsadm console, or give me Visual Studio and let me free in the “12 hive” (?).
So perhaps people should be careful about exactly what type of “SharePoint related” skills and experience they need. Due to the breadth and depth of the product I don’t believe there are very many people who know every nook and cranny of this particular product / platform !
Another comment: to your cultural difference point, I have another explanation: it could simply be a question of maturity. Some numbers:
USA: 310 million people, median age 36.8
India: 1.2 billion people, median age less than 25
I also receive e-mails with “urgent, reply ASAP with the solution”, not just from countries like India but also from interns in the US or Europe.
Marc,
Thanks for the perspective and thoughts. As a consultant, I give vast amounts of time to my clients to insure that they are able to solve business or technical problems with SharePoint. When I open up twitter, respond to a forum, post a comment or other public activities, I’m choosing to give some time to the community to share my experiences in hope that it will provide new insights into the platform. I can’t tell you the number of things that I’ve learned from other SharePoint community members and I am very thankful that this is one of the most open technical communities I have ever participated in, so my contributions are a way of giving back. However, if I provided all of my time free I couldn’t put food on the table for my family.
I usually ignore requests that state “please provide a solution”. I see these requests as more than a request for free advise. My firm is in business to provide solutions for our clients. This is why our clients hire our consultants, because we have a proven track record of being able to solve their business problems in an effective and timely manner.
I am more than willing to “provide a solution”, we just need a signed contract. However, if you need advise or help deciding the best option, I am more than willing to help!
Chris
I told my Mom about this post because I thought she might find it interesting. (It has more words and less technobabble than a lot of my posts.) She sent me back some observations from her field, which is Psychotherapy. If you read it, you’ll see that the apples don’t roll too far away from the branches.
+++++
This dilemma about a) how much free information to share b) with whom, and c) how – has been going on for a long time. Even happens in my field. Many young/new practitioners contacted me through the years and ask all kinds of questions-
* Can I have all your handouts for free? You can just email them to me. (for free? really?)
* Can I sit in on your sessions & find out how to do what you do? (undergraduate class in counseling 101)
* I need an internship for groups. I’ll co-facilitate with you, and I’ll do it for free! (no apparent skills…)
* Next time you are doing a training, I’ll do the research for you, and then I can get the credit! (how sweet)
* When you retire, you can send your clients to me. They’d love me! (not hardly…)
* I’ll buy all your furniture when you retire, and you won’t have to take care of it. $100. sound good? You can deliver it to my new office in Brandon. (an hour away…)
Hoo boy, some people operate out of a completely different play book. That said, if they had a good vibe and not a gimme vibe, I’d have lunch w/them, and share what I know about our work.
Wishing you well in this moral/business/economic dilemma. Tnx for sharing. Love, Mom
So the story doesn’t tell what happened to the handouts. Did your mom find a better use than giving them out for free?
The free model is pretty new in most professions, so it is not surprising that your mom didn’t consider it. What you haven’t mentioned – and might have forgotten – is that you actually get something in return. Today, Marc Anderson is known worldwide for his SharePoint expertise, and how did this happen? Thanks to the materials and advice you gave, which was easily relayed around the globe because it was… free.
Christophe:
Sometimes I feel like we’re jousting a little bit on these topics, but then I think about it some more and decide we aren’t, really. ;+) This particular blog post ended up containing more separate thoughts than I probably should have let happen. The main set of questions I was really talking about come from individuals through direct emails or through my blog contact form. They also very frequently come from gmail or hotmail accounts, so on some level the senders *may* be hiding their professional identities. There’s no fame or glory for answering those questions because usually only that one person even knows I’ve done it, so there’s just the satisfaction of maybe having helped someone over a hump. They may lead to a good blog post, but when the questions are really basic, not so much.
I’m obviously a big fan of the “give it away for free” model. Sure, I think I’m getting something out of all of this, and it’s not just self-satisfaction though there is a lot of that in all of this. I’m hoping that my free stuff leads to good, paid work. In this case good means challenging and with people who understand who I am and what I may be able to offer before they even talk to me. That’s a pretty cool situation when it does work.
M.
This is a really broad topic, and I’m a little late to it sadly. I’m looking forward to talking to you about it in person when I’m in Boston in a couple of weeks.
I think the only thing I would really like to comment on is “Clearly the offshoring idea is all about economics. I don’t care what anyone tells you about their motivations or how everyone at the overseas firm went to the best engineering university in their own country, it’s all about the money.”
I’m living in Pune, India, and I’ve spent the last 6 months building a really talented SharePoint only team (though have been involved with India for a lot longer). The people I work with here are the equal of any I have worked with anywhere, including all my days at Microsoft.
I think this statement is an oversimplification, (I know, sometimes its hard to avoid in a blog post) the customers we have been working with are certainly not just doing it for the money. There are plenty of cheaper places for them to go. Instead they are doing it because they care enough about their projects to look for exactly the right people to deliver them.
Some are working with us because they know what our people are capable of, some because they want round the clock support, some because we can respond more quickly to project demand (both capacity and start times) and some because we will happily deliver smaller projects.
So mate, come to Pune. We would really love to have you work out of our office for a while, we’d really look after you, and I can honestly say its one hell of an experience. There is no doubt in my mind that over the next 20 years some truly exciting things are going to happen here, and I for one am determined to be part of it!
Daniel
A great testimony, thanks Daniel for sharing this!
Dan:
There are exceptions to everything, and based on what I know of you, the team you’ve built is undoubtedly extremely talented.
The problem with broad generalization and hyperbole, both of which make for more interesting reading in most cases, is that you’re bound to piss someone off or be just plain wrong about some things. I own up to that in this post, guilty as charged where the facts merit. I also, despite my non-jingoistic worldview, only really have decent knowledge of what’s going on in the US market. Too often, the *only* reason for outsourcing here is that some middle level manager sees some vast cost savings for the short term. As I pointed out, there are extremely talented people the world over, but I’ll stick with my point that the *decision* to offshore is almost always economic.
If equally talented people can be found to actually do the work, along with the required extremely talented people to manage the process, then all is right. IMHO, this only works when the goals are extremely clear. My point is that collaborative solution development is an ever-changing target (I often say “An observed process is a changed process”), and being in the room for the discussion is different than being on the phone. That’s true whether around the world or around the corner.
M.
Daniel and I spend a significant amount of time in these “overseas countries”, and we know that what Daniel describes is not an exception. You are correct, this only works when goals (and processes) are clear, but you could actually consider this a benefit of remote collaboration.
As for generalisation, one mistake you’re making is to assimilate work overseas to offshoring. Remember that US companies are present all over the world, and their local employees are working hard to gain market shares that in the end benefit the US.
One can get good services but I think most people focus on saving cost and they less check on the quality they are going to get. First focus should be always on the quality then one should check for cost. If one is getting both then should go for that.