Dear Raj, As always, very sensible points.
I was wondering, is it possible for Rajagopal and like-minded chaps to do something if they _don't_ create an umbrella organisation? I'm thinking like a bunch of medical specialists who are 'visiting specialists' at a hospital. The patient treats the hospital as a convenience single-point of access and operational services (paying money at a common counter, booking appointments through a common telephone operator, etc), not delivery assurance. Do you think there's any chance that this sort of loose collection may work? Personally, I am not sure it'll work, because I feel that the customer has to have more than a minimum level of maturity to make use of such an offering, and IMHO the Indian IT services/solutions customer does not have that maturity, in most cases. He'll want a single umbrella organisation and a single contract. But I was just wondering -- what do you all think? Shuvam On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 07:09:49PM +0530, Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) wrote: > 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 -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
