Computer Economics IT metrics and best practices for the strategic and financial management of information systems.Focus on IT spending, IT staffing, IT security.Be aware of your organizations current culture.One of the significant forces that affect the success of your process improvement efforts is the culture of your.ITMAGINATION is helping its clients to innovate by providing professional software development and IT services, data analytics, and outsourcing.Best Practices For Outsourcing Software Programming' title='Best Practices For Outsourcing Software Programming' />Epic Fails when Outsourcing to India.Outsourcing to India is no walk in the park.The more advanced your projecttasks the more difficult it will be to succeed.In other words, for a basic website design these points will be easier to overcome and maybe some not even an issue.But as your projects get more complex these points will be more difficult to overcome and if you are not extremely careful any of these issues might cost you your projects and maybe even your business.In some extreme cases your perfectly working business model might be ruined as the management overhead associated with avoiding failure with take all your time and you will neglect aspects or other routes you should have explored.In follow up articles I will try to detail how each of these dangerous issues, from a business point of view, can be mitigated if not fully neutralized.I believe it is possible to succeed in outsourcing to India and ultimately this might put your business in a very good place.I ask my Indian friends to forgive me for stereotyping their great culture, sometimes in a simplisticcaricaturistic way, but in order to help the US readers of this article a bit of stereotyping might be more effective.Please know that I appreciate most of the Indian people I work with every day and I value there efforts greatly.The time difference with the United States is the worst possible.With about a 1. Download Adobe Pdf For X2 01 Nokia . MST Mountain Standard Time it is very difficult to find moments to speak.When you are tired in the evening they are just starting their day.When you are just starting your day they are tired in the evening.You are lucky if your developers are in and ready to speak before 9 0.PM MST.In the morning, assuming you are ready to talk technical details at 6 0.AM MST, you will be lucky to talk to a I just put in a full days of work developer working late that day.Indian culture is very verbal.They do not like to write things down.Of course it is impossible to fully stereotype 1.Indian people do not write much down.This leads you to constantly revisit the same issues.You might even get frustrated repeating the same thing again and again.Couple this with the time difference and right there you have a major challenge on your hands.India just went through 1.You might remember how in the late 9.People were joining these 6 month tech schools and joining.Well India just had 1.The result is you have people with the title of Software Engineer that should not be anywhere near actual code.Every year since the 9.Bluetooth Software For Aspire One D270 Reviews '>Bluetooth Software For Aspire One D270 Reviews .US and other western countries have been sending billions of dollars to IT professionals in India.This has created an internal dynamic in India where people with no real computer skills are actually getting computer degrees and finding work, further feeding the Indian Tech bubble.This fuels the difficulty in finding talented developers.Working remotely is a Pandoras box of potential problems.Hold on to your seat.Ive actually found people that sell a get rich quick technique based on working remotely for US customers and learning on the fly via those learn online sites.Yes you heard that right.Some people with no skills, create profiles online, apply to jobs and when they get a job they wing it.If you try to leave them bad feedback they will actually make you change your mind using arguments from you do not have to pay me to the fact that you might be destroying their lifecareer.Besides the flat out scam artist, it is very difficult to work remotely for 2 reasons Communication HonestyTrust.Mix working remotely with time zone differences, add some cultural differences and you can see how outsourcing can go from helping your business to eating up all of your available time, energy and maybe even money.Being smart is nearly a skill.Have you ever heard the story of a Polish worker who built an entire house from material he stole from his factory job During those communist years, he was able to build this house for free by grabbing building materials little by little over years.He was a hero in his village for doing this.In communist Poland he was considered smart.In the US he would be considered a dishonest employee that stole from his employer.Well you have a little bit of the same being smart syndrome with some India people.For example, a project manager might be able to double his revenue by making your dedicated programmers work on other projects at the same time.He justifies this by saying that your project is not doing badly and that the customer seems like a happy person.For some Indians, that is being smart.In other words getting more out of something even at the cost of some dishonesty can be seen has a skill to some in the land of Gandhi.The pyramid of salaries inexperienced developers.In India, a developers salary is limited.They must become project managers to make more money or even a manager of managers to make more money.The result is that you have a void of talent in the developer pool.You sometimes end up having very poor project managers that were very good developers.You sometimes find these Indian consulting firms with layers and layers of good managers while the quality of their developer pool is very low.Their best resources will be present during the sales process but when time comes to allocate resources for your project the talent pool will be very thin.Ultimately the success of a software project will depend on the quality of the code produced.The result is that you will find it very difficult to find a talented developer older than 2.You will end up working with developers that have very little true business experience.The key to good software is having developers that can think abstractly in terms of framework and patterns this thinking process takes years to develop.It is very hard to find even an Indian developer who can think that way.They are disorganized and extremely difficult to motivate.If you have a sizable project, which will take months or more to develop, you might find that days become weeks and weeks become months with very little progress made.Indian people seem to have a talent for working while accomplishing little.Im not certain exactly why this is, but many Indian developers seem content in what most here would consider a chaotic, stagnant project.This may be due to the fact that they are under 2.They have no clue what the big picture goal is.It is not easy to be motivated when you do not really comprehend why you are doing something.You will have to constantly monitormanage your project to avoid having your project become another casualty.Yes can have a different meaning.Yes can have a different meaning in India than in the US.If you tell your Indian bricklayer, we need to have this wall built by the end of the month and your brick layer replies yes.It does not mean yes the wall will be built by the end of the month.It might simply mean yes I hear what you just said.Some Indian people have a hard time saying no.Couple that with our different sense of time and you have a cultural gap that can lead to many missed deadlines.They have a difficult time taking responsibility.This is sort of related to the previous point.You might assume that telling your bricklayer that he should build that wall by the end of the month and him acknowledging yes it should be built by the end of the month means he takes responsibility for this and will do everything possible to meet that deadline.But for him it means yes it would be nice to have it done by then.Come the end of the month if the wall is not finished he will not even think about it twice.To him he did not really take responsibility in the Anglo sense of the term for this deadline so he is not even aware of missing any deadline.They are very good at excusesThis is a common problem all over the planet but I believe it is very developed in India.Culturally many Indians have evolved in a world where excuses i.In other words, when productivity is very low, making excuses for missing issues have very little effect or even no effect on the already low output.So why sweat it However when you are competing in a high productivity race that way of working is not acceptable and will lead to failure if not corrected.Stay tuned for my follow up article on what steps you need to take to avoid the pitfall in outsources to India and most other emerging nations.Budgeting Practices Nonprofit Accounting Basics.The budget process is the way an organization goes about building its budget.A good budgeting process engages those who are responsible for adhering to the budget and implementing the organizations objectives in creating the budget.Both finance committee and senior staff participation is built into the process and a timeline is established leaving adequate time for research, review, feedback, revisions, etc.The annual budgeting process should be documented, with tasks, responsibility assignments and deadlines clearly stated.A good budgeting process also incorporates strategic planning initiatives and stipulates that income is budgeted before expenses.Fixed costs are identified and related to reliable revenue.Budgeting decisions are driven both by mission priorities and fiscal accountability.Steps for developing a good budgeting process were covered in the previous section, The Budgeting Process.Good budgeting practices Practice income based budgeting.Budgeting is a form of risk management, and the most reliable budgets yielding the best fiscal results for the organization are conservative and income based.This means Budget for income first.Base income targets on realistic expectations and only include reliable income in the budget.Never include an income projection that simply fills the gap to cover expenses.This sets the organization up for a budget deficit if the organization fails to hit the plugged income targets.Take care to understand the impact and timing of restricted contributions and releases on the operating budget.Ensure expenses are lower than the dependable income total.This requires cooperation among all departments in setting organizational and programmatic priorities, timing new or adventuresome programs.Analyze and understand your revenue concentrations.Is your organization overly dependent on single source of revenueIn many cases, lack of diversification of revenue sources can pose a serious risk to the financial stability of an organization should a single large revenue source become unavailable.There is no universally right mix of revenue sources the right mix for your organization depends on your particular circumstances, your mission, your industry, your staff capacity, and even the age of your organization.For an organization with little or no earned revenue associated with programs, having 8.For another organization whose revenue sources appear to be well distributed among earned, government, foundations, corporations and individuals, the realization that 9.Risk is also present if a big portion of an organizations annual revenue depends on the success of a single fundraising event or annual program event.The organization must understand the impact a cancellation of the event would have.Confirm your budgets relationship to your mission and long rangestrategic goals.One of the very first tasks in the example budget process provided in the Tools Tips section of this web site is Review mission and strategic plan with the note Ensure that all strategic initiatives with budget impact are included in budget process.An organizations budget can and should demonstrate its commitment to its mission through numbers.Confirming the budgets relationship to mission requires answering questions such as Dont forget infrastructure.Folks who work for small and midsize nonprofit organizations generally are very hard workers, intensely devoted to mission accomplishment, often working longer hours at lower pay than their for profit counterparts.They deserve good tools and will perform even more efficiently and effectively with ongoing professional development opportunities and skills training.Budget to send them to that Excel class Include information technology upgrades and maintenance, evaluation, and staff development costs in the budget.High quality programs can best sustain and grow with a well trained and well equipped staff, both program and administrative, to support them.Budgeting to provide good pay and benefits for staffers is also a way to keep those well trained folks with you.Budget for capital in addition to operations.An organizational budget should take into account the organizations annual operating income and expenses, as well as ensuring resources for long lived andor non operating needs this is the capital budget.An organizational capital budget might cover several years and it should include target amounts and fundraising strategies to achieve strategic and financial sustainability goals.These could include creating or increasing an operating reservedeficit reductionfurniture, equipment, or software purchasesleasehold improvementsa building equipment maintenance and replacement funda fund to support new program initiatives, experimental pilot programs, etc.An organizational capital budget is different from a capital campaign budget, which is usually for bricks and mortar or other finite projects, although they could be related.For more about budgeting for capital, see Budgeting for Capital.Provide narrative notes to explain budget assumptions to the board.Board and finance committee members will appreciate explanations to help them understand the underlying thinking behind the numbers in the budget.It goes without saying that it is best to use a spreadsheet program to build budgets, but if notes are too many or too wordy to fit conveniently into spreadsheet cells, the notes could be written in a word processing document.Whether or not narrative notes are in a separate document, be sure to add letter or number keys to associate each note to the related spreadsheet line.Ill say it anyway it is best to use the right tool for the right job and let the software work for you.Please, never use word documents for budgeting its just plain dangerous the spreadsheet will do a more efficient and accurate job of adding those numbers up and will automatically revise the totals when changes are made.Pay attention to presentation.Your budget could be brilliant, well researched, and well documented, but if it is unreadable, your work will be undermined.Budgets that are easy to read and understand are well formatted.Characteristics of good formatting columns and rows are well labeled using font size, boldface, and underlines to create emphasis and for clarity,colors used for shading are chosen with blackwhite printing in mind, as not everyone will have a color printer lighter color shading under dark fonts or lighter font colors for darker shading dark fonts over intense colors are sometimes not readable when printed on non color printers,column headers and row labels are carried to any second pages,enough detail is included, but not too much,narrative notes are given when appropriate and are keyed to the data they refer to,print parameters are double checked before sending out electronic copies to avoid paper waste,footers include the file name and the work sheet name to assist with locating electronic version locations,consistent file naming protocols are followed to assist with version control ORG FY1.Budget 2.Sept 2. 1, then save new version as ORG FY1.Budget 2.Oct 5, and so on to have the latest version stack last in the Budget folder.Having an inclusive and thorough budget process, a conservative approach, documented policies, efficient budget tools, and well formatted budget presentation that tells your mission story by the numbers positions your organization to have the best results.Other Resources.Learning from the Community Effective Financial Management Practices in the Arts, a National Arts Strategies publication Jim Rosenberg, Principal Author Russell Willis Taylor, Editor, 2.EffectiveManagementPracticesintheArts.Financial Planning for Nonprofit Organizations by Jody Blazek, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 2.Financing Nonprofits, Putting Theory into Practice, edited by Dennis R.Young, Alta.
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