On Friday 24 Dec 2010, Rajagopal Swaminathan wrote: > We see a lot of professionals and SMBs who are member of this list. > > I was wondering if we all can form a sort of service network of > professional for various solutions using open/mixed source.
We had discussed this concept in detail in various ILUGD meetings (and eatings) for a long time. While the concept is excellent, there are a few practical problems in implementation that we discovered, so I'll share those and leave the floor to discussion on how they can be solved. The first issue is that of management and infrastructure. Considering our clients are corporates, education institutions and Government/NGOs, it is more or less imperative that there is a single umbrella organisation whom they can contact for support. The umbrella organisation itself can take support requests from clients, distribute to independent consultants internally, manage payments and track project progress. As a client, I would want a single point of contact. So far so good. The issues that arise from having an umbrella organisation, however, include: - What if more than one consultant is qualified to pick up a given lead? How does the umbrella organisation decide internally which consultant the lead should go to? - How do you rate the effectiveness of consultants? If you and I are charging respectively Rs 100 and Rs 10 for the same service, presumably there is a qualitative difference between the sort of work we do which justifies your higher rates. However, that is extremely difficult to measure, and clients usually aren't in a position to evaluate core technical competence vs hot air blustering. Sending the wrong consultant to the wrong client will result in the organisation (and FOSS) getting a bad name. - What happens if a consultant commits and doesn't deliver? We need to devise some framework by which consultants can be lined up so that if the first one fails there is another one ready to step into her shoes to keep the project going. Again, failure to do this will result in severe lack of client confidence. We also need to define success and failure metrics in advance of projects, so that slippages can be clearly identified and detected. Apart from the organisational problems, there is also the issue of continuity. We need to set systems in place that consultants are mandated to use which describe the work done by them in fine detail. This is required so that if one consultant is unable to take a second project from her client, the next consultant has access to all the configurations and customisations (with detailed reasons) so that she doesn't have to spend days just trying to figure out how things are currently working. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully should serve as a starting point for further thought. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves
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