Development of web production in the regions. The points of view of experts of the top studios runet (part 1)
Today, more and more large web studios are looking in the direction of the regions, picking up remote development teams for themselves. Why not? In the regions, in most cases, broadband Internet appeared. The professional level of regional developers has grown. The cost of an hour, compared with Moscow, is very attractive. Regional teams, in turn, want to work on interesting, complex projects, and not to conduct an educational program on what is a website in their city. So I decided to talk a bit with representatives of the top runet studios on the development of their own production in the regions, in order to understand how they see cooperation with remote teams.
I hope that this material (and maybe a series) will be of interest to regional teams and everyone who is not indifferent to the development of our industry as a whole. For me, as the head of one of the Moscow web studios , who have experience in creating their regional division , this topic is interesting and very relevant.
So, the first with whom I managed to talk was Oksana Klimenko, production manager of RBC SOFT . RBC SOFT has been developing Internet solutions for more than 10 years, is one of the five best runet studios and has remote development teams in Nizhny Novgorod and St. Petersburg.
HF: Moscow is engaged in sales, management and creativity, and the development is subcontracted to a regional team. Is this model effective?
OK: This is an abstract model, everything in life is not so. I can not imagine the Moscow office, which deals only with management and “creative”. Who should work in it? If sellers, project managers and art director, what is the scheme of their work? The customer came, the sales manager talked to him, formulated the task, the customer is ready to pay ... What's next?
')
HF: Probably, the art director and the project manager come up with a creative idea that is being demonstrated to the client?
OK: First, managers need to be kept away from the "creative". The manager is a manager, he must properly organize the process, and not be creative. Secondly, for me there is no word “creative”. This is a fiction marketers. In any project there is a sense, and the person working with information should be responsible for the meaning. And this is not an art director, but an information architect. But even he alone will do little. Only a team can invent and model a good idea.
Now imagine that this team has its hands in St. Petersburg and its brains in Moscow. Technologically difficult project in this situation is impossible to do. If the project is typical, from the series “we have done such a thousand times,” and does not require intensive work of the brain for design - it can be given into the hands of a regional team.
HF: Ie Do you give turnkey projects to the regions that do not affect the development of something completely new?
OK: There are two categories of work that we transfer to the regions. The first one is typical projects, I have already mentioned them. The second is some stages of complex projects, when we work with regional teams “according to tasks”. Task management is partially automated and controlled by the traffic manager. Well, if a regional team is able to independently make any complex project from scratch - why are we such a team?
HF: Is the economic component of working with a regional team effective?
OK, yes. The farther the region, the more profitable for us. You do not even need to analyze this - you compare the settlement rates, and everything becomes obvious. Even adjusted for the difference in the qualifications of specialists.
HF: But what about the cost of communication and so on?
OK: As soon as we switched to a rigid task-setting system, the cost of communication has greatly decreased. Instead of useless arguments about “what the client wants” and “I think it should blink and jump here,” the performer receives a short but exhaustive statement of the problem. But the way to solve it depends on its qualifications and imagination. Perhaps the small studios with a small stream of orders have time to talk. We, unfortunately, do not.
HF: What are you ready to order (order) from the regions?
OK: All instrumental part: programming, testing, technical design, layout, content management. Everything except the design.
HF: What about design? No problems with this in the region?
OK: No. In the regions there are very good designers for specific tasks. Someone may not cope with the design for the state portal, but will make an excellent layout for the car dealer website. A designer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is a much more loyal and flexible creature than, for example, a programmer. He has multivariate thinking, and therefore he adapts more quickly. Unlike a programmer who tries to transform the world into a complete structure with given properties, methods and events.
HF: What requirements, in your opinion and experience, should a regional team meet?
OK: It is important for me that the team be headed by an intelligent person with whom I personally will find a common language. There are, for example, sensible experts, but it is sloppy. Or vice versa, mandatory and punctual, but do not include the head. I always look at the leader. If I can work with this person, I can work with his team.
HF: Are there any bottlenecks, for example technological, that arise when working with regions?
OK: There is no technology. Our biggest difficulty is that one team, for example, is very meticulous, and the second is too independent. Therefore, the first task is to “chew”, and the second sometimes to keep from unnecessary actions. But this is a normal production process. This is not a problem, but the specifics of working with a specific team.
HF: What form of cooperation is most effective? Team rental, hourly pay, piecework?
OK: Rent is unprofitable. We have most of the projects for hourly pay - where the work goes on tasks. Piece payment is advisable on projects that are fully made in the region.
HF: Why is it ineffective to keep on salary? After all, programmers do not like to set the hours worked, to be distracted by these non-core tasks.
OK: With a fixed salary and the best specialists lose their incentive. A person is sitting on a salary, and even if he loses Call of Duty all month, he will receive a salary anyway. And when the thickness of his wallet depends on the actual spent on the task
time is another story.
HF: How does the evaluation go in this case? Who initially assesses the task?
OK: Evaluates the profile manager. We had a situation when a regional programmer spent 5 times more time to solve a problem than the main programmer and the regional manager estimated. We don't work with this friend anymore,
and the penalty for disrupting the deadline was received by the entire regional team.
HF: Are all hours or regions only working?
OK: At the hourly rate only regions.
HF: An average of 150 working hours per month. How many of them does the programmer work out?
OK: 100-120 hours.
HF: It's not physically possible. He spends at least 40% on communications, discussions, etc.
OK: Communication is an old, beloved excuse. Example: a half-hour manager wrote a letter to the developer with lyrical digressions about how to make a loan calculator. A programmer between the smoke breaks read this letter and thought for a long time. Then they went to smoke together and spent another hour discussing whose kung fu is better. The manager then wrote a second letter based on these discussions. The programmer read the letter again and even commented. Manager comments digested and agreed with the customer. By evening, everyone was very tired, but the programmer did not start work. Here is what you call "communications."
HF: How to get rid of it?
OK: It is enough to formalize and automate the process of setting tasks. A well-formulated problem, which contains all the data necessary for its solution, is almost a half-solved problem.
HF: Are there key points (or people) that decide the success of a collaboration?
OK: I already answered this question. Team leader.
HF: If you look 5-7 years ahead, how do you see the web development sector in Russia?
OK: I think many customers and performers will finally understand that content is more important than appearance. The design will cease to be a “thing in itself” and will become a tool for competent presentation of information. The systems on which everything will be assembled will be simplified, their number will be reduced, the development process will become faster and cheaper.
There is one more thing that is hard to miss. The rapid development of mobile technology. When 70% of users prefer communicators to ordinary computers, the sites in their current form will die out.
HF: Will large outsourcing productions in the field of web development appear in Russia, so-called? production clusters? I threw the task, at the output I got a quality standard result. There are analogues in India, Korea and other countries.
OK: Hardly. We will never work like them. Why does India now account for almost half of the global IT outsourcing market? And because she has 30 years of state support for training in IT specialties and tax breaks for the entire IT industry. Conclusions do it yourself.
PS If the material finds interest from readers, we will continue conversations with studio representatives about the development of regional productions. Send your questions, comments. The theme of the development of web productions in the regions and their cooperation with the center is very interesting and little disclosed. Let's share the experience.
I hope that this material (and maybe a series) will be of interest to regional teams and everyone who is not indifferent to the development of our industry as a whole. For me, as the head of one of the Moscow web studios , who have experience in creating their regional division , this topic is interesting and very relevant.
So, the first with whom I managed to talk was Oksana Klimenko, production manager of RBC SOFT . RBC SOFT has been developing Internet solutions for more than 10 years, is one of the five best runet studios and has remote development teams in Nizhny Novgorod and St. Petersburg.
HF: Moscow is engaged in sales, management and creativity, and the development is subcontracted to a regional team. Is this model effective?
OK: This is an abstract model, everything in life is not so. I can not imagine the Moscow office, which deals only with management and “creative”. Who should work in it? If sellers, project managers and art director, what is the scheme of their work? The customer came, the sales manager talked to him, formulated the task, the customer is ready to pay ... What's next?
')
HF: Probably, the art director and the project manager come up with a creative idea that is being demonstrated to the client?
OK: First, managers need to be kept away from the "creative". The manager is a manager, he must properly organize the process, and not be creative. Secondly, for me there is no word “creative”. This is a fiction marketers. In any project there is a sense, and the person working with information should be responsible for the meaning. And this is not an art director, but an information architect. But even he alone will do little. Only a team can invent and model a good idea.
Now imagine that this team has its hands in St. Petersburg and its brains in Moscow. Technologically difficult project in this situation is impossible to do. If the project is typical, from the series “we have done such a thousand times,” and does not require intensive work of the brain for design - it can be given into the hands of a regional team.
HF: Ie Do you give turnkey projects to the regions that do not affect the development of something completely new?
OK: There are two categories of work that we transfer to the regions. The first one is typical projects, I have already mentioned them. The second is some stages of complex projects, when we work with regional teams “according to tasks”. Task management is partially automated and controlled by the traffic manager. Well, if a regional team is able to independently make any complex project from scratch - why are we such a team?
HF: Is the economic component of working with a regional team effective?
OK, yes. The farther the region, the more profitable for us. You do not even need to analyze this - you compare the settlement rates, and everything becomes obvious. Even adjusted for the difference in the qualifications of specialists.
HF: But what about the cost of communication and so on?
OK: As soon as we switched to a rigid task-setting system, the cost of communication has greatly decreased. Instead of useless arguments about “what the client wants” and “I think it should blink and jump here,” the performer receives a short but exhaustive statement of the problem. But the way to solve it depends on its qualifications and imagination. Perhaps the small studios with a small stream of orders have time to talk. We, unfortunately, do not.
HF: What are you ready to order (order) from the regions?
OK: All instrumental part: programming, testing, technical design, layout, content management. Everything except the design.
HF: What about design? No problems with this in the region?
OK: No. In the regions there are very good designers for specific tasks. Someone may not cope with the design for the state portal, but will make an excellent layout for the car dealer website. A designer, contrary to conventional wisdom, is a much more loyal and flexible creature than, for example, a programmer. He has multivariate thinking, and therefore he adapts more quickly. Unlike a programmer who tries to transform the world into a complete structure with given properties, methods and events.
HF: What requirements, in your opinion and experience, should a regional team meet?
OK: It is important for me that the team be headed by an intelligent person with whom I personally will find a common language. There are, for example, sensible experts, but it is sloppy. Or vice versa, mandatory and punctual, but do not include the head. I always look at the leader. If I can work with this person, I can work with his team.
HF: Are there any bottlenecks, for example technological, that arise when working with regions?
OK: There is no technology. Our biggest difficulty is that one team, for example, is very meticulous, and the second is too independent. Therefore, the first task is to “chew”, and the second sometimes to keep from unnecessary actions. But this is a normal production process. This is not a problem, but the specifics of working with a specific team.
HF: What form of cooperation is most effective? Team rental, hourly pay, piecework?
OK: Rent is unprofitable. We have most of the projects for hourly pay - where the work goes on tasks. Piece payment is advisable on projects that are fully made in the region.
HF: Why is it ineffective to keep on salary? After all, programmers do not like to set the hours worked, to be distracted by these non-core tasks.
OK: With a fixed salary and the best specialists lose their incentive. A person is sitting on a salary, and even if he loses Call of Duty all month, he will receive a salary anyway. And when the thickness of his wallet depends on the actual spent on the task
time is another story.
HF: How does the evaluation go in this case? Who initially assesses the task?
OK: Evaluates the profile manager. We had a situation when a regional programmer spent 5 times more time to solve a problem than the main programmer and the regional manager estimated. We don't work with this friend anymore,
and the penalty for disrupting the deadline was received by the entire regional team.
HF: Are all hours or regions only working?
OK: At the hourly rate only regions.
HF: An average of 150 working hours per month. How many of them does the programmer work out?
OK: 100-120 hours.
HF: It's not physically possible. He spends at least 40% on communications, discussions, etc.
OK: Communication is an old, beloved excuse. Example: a half-hour manager wrote a letter to the developer with lyrical digressions about how to make a loan calculator. A programmer between the smoke breaks read this letter and thought for a long time. Then they went to smoke together and spent another hour discussing whose kung fu is better. The manager then wrote a second letter based on these discussions. The programmer read the letter again and even commented. Manager comments digested and agreed with the customer. By evening, everyone was very tired, but the programmer did not start work. Here is what you call "communications."
HF: How to get rid of it?
OK: It is enough to formalize and automate the process of setting tasks. A well-formulated problem, which contains all the data necessary for its solution, is almost a half-solved problem.
HF: Are there key points (or people) that decide the success of a collaboration?
OK: I already answered this question. Team leader.
HF: If you look 5-7 years ahead, how do you see the web development sector in Russia?
OK: I think many customers and performers will finally understand that content is more important than appearance. The design will cease to be a “thing in itself” and will become a tool for competent presentation of information. The systems on which everything will be assembled will be simplified, their number will be reduced, the development process will become faster and cheaper.
There is one more thing that is hard to miss. The rapid development of mobile technology. When 70% of users prefer communicators to ordinary computers, the sites in their current form will die out.
HF: Will large outsourcing productions in the field of web development appear in Russia, so-called? production clusters? I threw the task, at the output I got a quality standard result. There are analogues in India, Korea and other countries.
OK: Hardly. We will never work like them. Why does India now account for almost half of the global IT outsourcing market? And because she has 30 years of state support for training in IT specialties and tax breaks for the entire IT industry. Conclusions do it yourself.
PS If the material finds interest from readers, we will continue conversations with studio representatives about the development of regional productions. Send your questions, comments. The theme of the development of web productions in the regions and their cooperation with the center is very interesting and little disclosed. Let's share the experience.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/75044/
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