The TecBlast Blog

You have probably heard the stories: Software that does not work. Software that does the wrong thing. Money paid to set up an offshore operation that never produces any software. Can these outsourcing nightmares be avoided?

Of course. The key is how you manage the outsourcing of your software development.

The two biggest fears of outsourcing that I hear from clients are the fear of selecting a bad outsourcing vendor and the fear of not managing their work effectively. Let’s assume you pick a great team, perhaps one of the proven Accelerance teams from around the world. Even then you may still have lingering worries about getting your software developed quickly. Here are eight ways you can manage your outsourcing to get reliable results.

(1) Milestone tracking - Your plan for outsourcing should include some estimating and scheduling. The outsourced team should commit to dates for the completion of the milestones. Define your development milestones so they occur frequently and make corrections if they are not being met.

(2) Requirements tracking - Make sure the features you need are being completed properly in each release. You want to make sure your users will be able to gain the maximum benefit from your software. You don’t want important details to be lost or forgotten.

(3) Daily monitoring of your outsourcing progress - No news is NOT good news. You need regular communication with your outsourced team. This should occur almost everyday. You should at least have a regular email or a conference call on specific days to make sure things are going well and that unresolved issues are not blocking progress.

(4) Continuous builds - Put a system in place to re-compile and build your software every time a developer checks in a source file. This allows you to detect problems as they occur so they can be fixed quickly and do not lead to a delayed software release.

(5) Test-driven development - You should require your outsourced engineers to perform unit tests of their programming work. Tests should be created first, before the feature is implemented. Writing the test first helps clarify what the software should do. It also builds a set of regression tests that can be performed later to check for basic system functionality.

(6) Integration testing and Quality Assurance - Testing of the individual software modules by the outsourced developers is not enough. You also need to test the entire system to make sure high levels of functionality and quality will be experienced by your users. Comprehensive testing requires automation to check all paths through the user interface. A full QA process also verifies the software behaves well when users make “mistakes.”

(7) Collaboration for design and problem resolution - If the engineers are working in your office then you just meet with them to resolve the issue face-to-face. Of course, this is not possible when the engineers are thousands of miles away across one or more oceans. But with the Internet you can get pretty darn close. An email or instant message conversation can often resolve your issues. Using the telephone is also an extremely useful tool and with VOIP software like Skype, Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk the communication cost is zero. The important point is that the tools are available to make long-distance collaboration a reality and they enable extensive use of outsourcing to be practical.

(8) Knowledge management and retention - You provide a specification to the outsourced team. Issues are resolved and clarifications are made. Then the software is delivered and it works well. But what if the outsourced team leaves the picture? Will you be able to pick up the software and make changes efficiently? Yes, if you have gained the knowledge of how the software is written. The technical documentation describing the architecture and workings of your software should be created by you or your outsourced team. You don’t need a huge tome no one will read. Simple installation instructions and architectural documents that can facilitate the learning process and enable your US engineers to deploy and support your software are sufficient.

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Believe me. You will gain peace of mind and produce great software when you apply these powerful techniques to manage your outsourcing. Use of these techniques will quell your fears and help you bravely take advantage of the benefits of outsourcing in the new global economy.

Steve Mezak is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and international outsourcing expert. Get your copy of his free report now on “The Seven Deadly Dangers of Outsourcing Your Software Development” by visiting http://www.Accelerance.com

As an HR professional, you have responsibilities in several broad areas that have a significant impact on your company’s bottom line, directly contributing to the corporate return on investment. The outsourcing choices you make are critical decision points that affect both your employer and the HR community at large. We recognize that you want and need to make informed choices, and we can help.

The following problem analysis explores emerging strategies in human resources.

Increased workloads resulting from governmental requirements, budgetary cutbacks, profitability margins and operational necessity require that HR professionals do more with diminishing resources. In approaching this challenge, we analyze a range of choices. Depending on your company’s culture, you may consider any or all of the following:

• working nights and weekends

• creating and hiring a new position

• outsourcing a function or large project

• directly contracting with an independent professional colleague: Outsourced professional employee

Problem Analysis

Many times each day you reach a decision point and choose which priorities get your time and attention. Accepting added accountability in your HR department and thriving with your ever-growing workload require detailed analysis of your decision points.

Working nights and weekends

Every HR professional worth his or her paycheck is pressed for time. Workweeks ranging from 55 to 60 hours are commonplace. You’ve determined that you’re already working smart and hard to keep current with the business’s needs. Your human resource career has transitioned from a hands-on tactical position to holding down a strategic role in the HR department. As the competition for capital intensifies, how will your decision to outsource translate to your company’s bottom line?

Creating and hiring a new position

G & A cutbacks mean that there’s no budget for new hires this year. The term hiring freeze has made a comeback after nearly a decade in hibernation. You no longer fill vacancies as they occur, and this trend may continue for the near future. In fact, you quite possibly severed someone with whom you worked closely. How will you provide greater results with less?

Outsourcing a function or large project

Speak to ten companies, and ten HR managers will define outsourcing differently. Small- or medium-size firms frequently use single-source outsourcing for operations such as payroll or benefits. Fortune 500 firms have moved toward outsourcing all transactional and tactical practices. Seven-, eight- and nine-figure contracts in the form of comprehensive solutions have increased dramatically over recent years. Once set into motion, Fortune 500 outsourcing agreements often have a shelf life of five or more years. The definitions employers use to quantify successful outsourcing depend on the goals and objectives outlined at the onset of each engagementand they vary widely. How will you determine if and when outsourcing meets your needs?

Directly contracting with an independent professional colleague: Outsourced professional employee

Today’s economy challenges HR professionals to demonstrate their advocacy of responsible stewardship. Historically, the personnel agency evolved as the American franchise economy grew from the 1950s. By the 1970s, franchise usage expandedfrom food to cars to personnel. The decade of the 1990s required the franchise and boutique staffing agencies to invest heavily in technology or sink in the mud.

The novel Ivanhoe characterized soldiers who offered their lances to any king as free lances. Today’s e-commerce and growing media technologies, wireless Internet with DSL, and effective corporate Web sites with e-mail together provide the daily tools used by the modern entrepreneur. A solution with both strategic and visionary applications is to identify and formulate direct relationships with independent HR professionals. How can you partner and leverage these tools immediately?

With research, you can determine the outsourced professional employee who is a solution in search of problems. A July 2003 survey by Consultive Source asked human resource professionals to rank the importance of the following three vision & values competencies held by HR vendors:

• MEASURABLE RESULTS Delivery of solutions by the alignment of HR mission, vision and strategy

• CONSULTIVE Solving problems with hands-on industry experience, creating a strategic alliance significantly stronger than a typical vendor/supplier relationship

• HUMAN RESOURCE LEADERSHIP The blending of business savvy, leadership, facilitation/coaching, strategic perspective, conceptual thinking, internal consulting and the tangible perspective of human resources within the organization

The survey listed MEASURABLE RESULTS at the top, with 77 percent of the vote. CONSULTIVE SKILLS and HUMAN RESOURCE LEADERSHIP tied for second place.

Any freelance outsourced professional employee may prescribe to this and should prioritize their skill set accordingly. Concerns about the outsourced professional employee’s abilities, stability and results can resolve themselves by taking a “test drive.”

Similar to your auto mechanic and electrician, you expect consistent service from those you know and trust. The traits exhibited by every outsourced professional employee must include high quality service, fair prices and deadlines met as needed to name just a few.

The right outsourced professional employee at a fair and competitive rate will provide innovation in education, strategy, technical resources and skills. Choosing to outsource and manage this partnership and process successfully will enable you to protect corporate capitol and shareholder value. Which technology applications or transactional differences describe your vendors as a strategic partner of choice?

John T. Mooney 2003 All Rights Reserved

About The Author

Focused exclusively on EMPLOYEE RELATIONS, HR COMMUNICATIONS and RECRUITMENT PROJECTS contact John Mooney at (972) 355-7481 or email JMooney@ConsultiveSource.com or the company website www.ConsultiveSource.com.

I utilize extensive hands-on industry competencies to solve your HR challenges. Supporting small, medium or large human resource projects with 20 years of human resource and operating experience, John Mooney has a results-oriented, focused approach to the human resource needs.

Author of “The Art of Computer Programming”; creator of TEX and METAFONT; and inventor of the strangest software versioning systems ever. Well known for many reasons, famous for a few; Donald Ervin Knuth is most certainly a legend in his own lifetime.

His series of books, The Art of Computer Programming [’TAOCP’], was first introduced to the public in 1968. It is still in production. Volumes 1 to 3 are available at all good bookshops, with volume 5 currently scheduled for release in 2010. Advance order your copies now. Once he completes volume five, Donald thinks that the time will be about right for a revision of volumes 1-3. Don’t expect this any time soon.

Knuth offers $2.56 to each person that alerts him to an error in one of his published works. Why $2.56? Well, because that’s the number of pennies in a hexadecimal dollar, of course.

In between writing what is arguably the most famous and respected computer science text ever produced, performing the duties of a retired professor, being an accomplished organist, and winning a plethora of awards, Knuth produced the TEX software and METAFONT language.

The versioning systems used for his creations are unique and somewhat quirky. New versions of TEX are numbered with versions approaching pi; METAFONT’s versioning system similarly approaches e. Once Knuth passes from this realm, the development of the software and language will stop, with any remaining bugs remaining as “features”. This appears to be the inspiration behind much of the development of the Windows Operating System which contains an ever increasing array of interesting “features”.

A quote from the man himself: “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it”.

Copywriters: whether you’re in-house, small agency or even a temp gig-hopper, chances are you’re working alongside designers who use Quark Express. So there will definitely come a time when you’re required to open up a Quark document and make changes to the text. If you’re smart, you’ll realize that the more comfortable you are in Quark, the less of a chance you’ll have of peeving your coworkers by destroying what’s already there.

Quark Express is a phenomenal program that you can FLY AROUND in, provided you know what you’re doing. The tools are there, all it takes is a little practice. Wouldn’t it be great to know you’ve got the edge over the typical non-Quark copywriter? Following are seven Quark Express tricks that are guaranteed to have you breezing through those copy changes in record time.

1. Zoom In, Zoom Out.

Why You Need It: headline creation. Most likely, your job requires you to “pop in” several headlines and subheads on a single-page, tabloid-sized ad. A good copywriter knows that her headline themes shall not repeat each other, so if you’re able to zoom in, type the text, zoom out again and view the entire page, you’ll be primed for a speedy eagle-eye headline review.

How to Do It:

Zoom in: Start with a view of the whole page. With your cursor on the Move Tool (looks like a big asterisk), hold the right mouse button down and drag it downward on the diagonal. This is how you “marquee” around a section of text you want to look at up-close. What you’re doing here is simply creating a viewing window.

Zoom out: (Command-zero) Put your right thumb on the COMMAND (or open apple) key and your index finger on the (0) zero. (Not to be confused with the letter O, which if you hit that would open another document.)

Put these two together: Command-zero for a panoramic page view, marquis around on specific area. Command-zero, marquis. Do it again. Do it one more time. Are you getting the hang of the zoom in, zoom out? It’s pretty handy to know.

2. Clicking Through Stacked Layers.

Why You Need It: most copywriters know the sinking feeling of trying to click a text box in Quark and being unable to “get at” the text. What’s going on here? There’s probably another, transparent text box covering the text box. Here’s what to do.

How to Do It:

Put your left three fingers on SHIFT, ALT and COMMAND (again, COMMAND is the apple key) and hold down. While depressing these keys, use the right hand to click the text box you’re trying to get at. Repeat clicking until you see those little “grabber corners” appear on the box you want to change. What the “chord” does here is allow you to click down through the layers and get to the text box to make your edits. Be sure that you click the Text (T) tool before typing your changes. When you’re done, just click away and move on to the next task.

3. Moving Around the Page Without Scrolling.

Why You Need It: Sure you can scroll, but who wants to wait for the page view to catch up with a redraw? An easier method for “scooting” around in your Quark document follows.

How to Do It:

Click the Move tool and then “zoom out” for a view of the entire document. (See Tip 1 if you don’t know how to do this.) With your left hand, press the COMMAND key and keep it engaged. You’ll notice that the cursor has changed to a little “hand-grabber.” Drag the mouse in any direction, and the page moves with you. Pretty cool, eh?

4. Duplicate Text Box.

Why You Need It: You may want to type a new headline into a designed group of text boxes, but you’re afraid to mess up the design. So rather than destroy what the poor artist took hours to create, you can “duplicate” their text box to get the exact text specs you need to work with. You can then drag your duped text box onto the pasteboard and let them know you’ve placed the new headline there.

How to Do It:

Just click any text box, and press COMMAND-D. The text box will multiply by one, and you will see an identical text box right next to it.

Note: if you want to get fancy, double-click the new text box, change the background color to something flashy like yellow, and then hit F5 to “bring it to the front.” Then place your new headline on top of the old one. Be sure to tell the designer you did this just in case he objects or has a better solution. If it turns out he loves your method, use the Duplicate trick in Tip 4 to dupe your new “headline text box,” cover your next headline with the new box and type in the next headline.

5. Group and Ungroup.

Why You Need It: Quark designers often use “double” text boxes stacked one on top of the other to create shadowed headlines. The top text box contains text in one color, and the box beneath it contains text in another. The bottom text box is shifted just a skoche. When viewed together, this looks like text with a shadow! You will find the trouble happens when you try to change the headline - why can’t you get at the box underneath!?

The reason is because the boxes have been grouped together. You can see two or more grouped boxes because they’ll be framed with a dotted line. When you grab for one box, they all move together.

How to Do It:

Try this: Click the Text tool. Create a text box and type in short headline using one of the thicker fonts. Now make sure you’ve clicked the box and then use COMMAND-D to duplicate it. You now have two identical headlines. Select one of these, and highlight the text, then change the color to white. Go back to the first text box and position that one so it almost totally covers the white text (but leave a little shadow room). If you can’t get the darker-colored box to sit on top of the white, click the darker box, and hit the F5 key. This will “bring to front.” When both boxes are positioned the way you like them, group them as follows:

Put your left index finger on the SHIFT KEY. With the right hand, click the headline. You will see that one of the two boxes will show “grabber” tabs. While keeping shift held down the entire time, click again and this time BOTH boxes will be designated. With the left, do a COMMAND-G. Now your two text boxes are grouped together! You can move them wherever you’d like. To UNGROUP, simply do a COMMAND-U.

6. Show Invisibles.

Why You Need It: Invisibles are a copywriter’s best friend. If you turn yours on, you can see every single space and every carriage return vs. soft return. So if there’s an extra accidental space or unintended hard return, you’ll be able to see it and fix it easily!

Note: Carriage returns and soft returns affect your text leading. If you want to set the leading for one paragraph of text, place a hard carriage return at the end of the first line of text and at end of the last line where you’d like to retain the leading. Any other forced returns within that paragraph should be “soft returns” (press SHIFT and RETURN together).

How to Do It:

To Show Invisibles, simply do a COMMAND-I. To shut off invisibles, do a COMMAND-I again. Easy enough!

7. Shrink or Enlarge Text Proportionately.

Why You Need It: In Quark, you can specify each aspect of your text design including size, font, color and leading for every letter or line. Once you’re happy with the proportional arrangement of your text within one box, you may decide the proportion is a-okay but the size is all wrong! To make every single item in that text box larger or smaller, use the below technique.

How to Do It:

Put your left hand in “chord” placement again. (Press the COMMAND-ALT-SHIFT keys together and keep them held down). With the Text tool highlighted, grab the corner of the text box and either pull out or in, depending on if you want to scale the item bigger or smaller. Notice how everything in the box gets larger or smaller yet retains the same proportions! Now that’s a handy trick.

These are just a few of many more Quark tricks designed to make your life easier. Instead of getting horrified looks from your coworkers, wouldn’t it be great to hear excited murmurs of “The copywriter knows Quark!” from the design team? Of course it would. So start practicing and with any luck you’ll be a Quark Master by next week!

Copyright 2005 Dina Giolitto. All rights reserved.

Dina Giolitto is a copywriting consultant and ghostwriter with 10 years of experience writing corporate print materials and web content. Trust her with your next e-book, article series or web project, and make a lasting impression on your audience of information-hungry prospects. Visit http://www.wordfeeder.com for more details.

A spyware plague can create major unnecessary disk usage, network traffic, and CPU activity that thereby reduce the legitimate utilization of these resources. Stability problems such as system wide or application crashes are very common nuisance created by spyware. For this reason the analysts known as spyware arises without the knowledge of a user.

When using your computer it is important to use virus protection, anti-spyware programs and other techniques to keep prying eyes off of your computer. But make sure you do not download or buy any program without checking its authenticity, at least now onwards. Spyware removal software can also be a part of anti-spyware programs. Data loggers, key loggers are just a few programs which harvest info from your computer. Winclear is the only program created specially to auto remove such spywares. A couple based in Philadelphia was recently arrested for their illegal use of the spyware program Spector which is a widely available program that anyone can buy for under $100. That is why every computer owner needs winclear.

Protect With Winclear :How To Search History For A Particular Time Period
However, just like a coin, the Internet has two sides. This cyber world can also be used by sexual predators, cheating spouses and unscrupulous employees to promulgate their illegal or malevolent activities. Thus, we ought to do something to help ensure that our children, employees and spouses only make use of the Internet positively. Winclear is the only software which is capable of removing keylogger programs. Why? Have you ever noticed certain changes in the performance of your PC? If you ever noticed some slow down the performance of your PC there are lots of possibility that you are being watch. Winclear has been the industry leader in fighting keyloggers for the last 8 years.

Winclear:
Spyware Doctor is a multi-award winning spyware removal utility that is available for you both in free trial and paid version. That is the reason why you need Winclear installed onto your computer. It seems that this technique is actually a separate scam aimed at stealing personal information and such attacks are on the rise. Protect your computer security by using Winclear! More about Winclear here: Winclear.

Registry Cleaner Reviews:
The registry is very fragile. It can be looked at like the spinal cord of your operating system and is basically the nerve center of your PC. If one little letter is messed up it can cause big problems. Before ever messing around with your registry you must make sure you have a current backup. This backup should be kept off of your computer and on a floppy disk or cd. One easy tool you can use to make the backup process easier for you is ERUNT which stand for The Emergency Recovery Utility NT.. This Windows Registry is where all the information about your computer is stored.

Free Registry Cleaner By Microsoft To Downloae:
Getting the right registry cleaner is very critical to your online privacy. You must make it a point to read all the registry cleaner reviews before attempting to buy your own registry cleaner. The complex keys of the registry system can become corrupted and fail to function efficiently, or fail to function at all. This can cause the operating system or its associated applications to malfunction, slow the system down considerably or even crash the entire system. This could lead to you having to reinstall the operating system loosing vital data or programs that were installed with the system. This is the reason the keep the registry free from clutter with a reliable registry cleaner.
Registry Cleaners Go By Many Titles. Many registry software cleaners or utility manufacturers we should say have created thousands of versions of registry tools. Almost all of them are registry cleaners. They maybe called registry repair tools or anything to do with the registry. The main function is to delete or clean the registry of all the unwanted information and entries that are slowing down the system. All these registry tools detect malfunctioning entries and repair the registries quite efficiently. This is the very purpose of a windows registry cleaner to scan the system registry and locate errors and repair the registry to make it function flawlessly.. More reviews at: Registry Cleaner Reviews

Registry Cleaners: Clean Xp Registry Of:

The free registry repair works like a charm. Do you know how many millions of unused files laying in the system? Some clear the browser cache and use windows XP disk clean up and still is difficult as more are created by the third party programs, installers, java cache files, adware and virus programs etc, so why not use the free registry repair. I am sure this free registry repair will not slow your computer daily database operation.. If you own a computer, you must have your very own registry cleaners installed. If you have questions on anything just ask an employee they generally have a good idea of the latest computing news.