coComment

coComment is a service for managing, powering and researching conversations online. When using coComment, the user can keep track of his/her comments across any site, share them with friends, and get notified when you get a response. coComment is a Swiss company, founded in January 2007, backed by Swisscom Ventures and NGI Capital.

coComment built up a team of 21 developers in Kiev, Ukraine with Ciklum as its partner. We did not consider this as 'outsourcing' in the normally accepted sense but, instead, as choosing to locate our technology team in a location where we could have ready access to skilled engineers and reduce our operating costs. We did not, unlike some, have a separate design facility elsewhere which submitted concepts for development.

Our team was one of which we were extremely proud and believe that they would bear comparison with the best in the world.

This is a brief summary of how we reached this outcome.
 

The first thing we did was to produce our Business Plan. We felt very strongly that we needed to be able to articulate clearly to potential partners and anyone joining us the following key pieces of information:

• Our company goals (users, releases etc)
• Our organisational structure
• Our hiring plan
• Our ethos and brand

We were in the fortunate position of being able to locate our technology team wherever we chose. However, a key factor was easy accessibility … since we were developing new concepts and functionalities continually we needed to be able to be on-site a lot and this mitigated against anywhere too distant.

In the end, we considered partners in Canada, Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Russia. Our assessment was based on the requirements presented in Table 1.

Table 1: Assessment Criteria of Partners
Criteria	Weighting
Project Management	10
Development Experience (RAD)	10
Innovation	10
Fit to Company Management	6
Risk Management & Awareness	8
Costing	8
Contractual	8

We weighted each criteria based on our specific needs. We then, on each initial visit to a potential partner, rated them against each criteria on a score of 1-10. The result was that Ciklum was a clear winner; in particular since we wanted to have a retained team that was part of our company as opposed to a team of contract programmers and developers for whom coComment was just another project.

In essence, we ended up using Ciklum as the provider of infrastructure, admin, HR and payroll which removed the administrative headache we would have faced in setting up our own entity in Ukraine whilst still allowing us to directly manage and build our own team.

For small companies developing innovative and new technology this is critical; the key individuals are invaluable to your organisation and you don't want to take the risk that they could be deployed elsewhere and take with them key information about how to develop and support your products.
 

We came to Kiev three times before we found the right manager for our team. Our focus was very much on finding the right team manager first and then working with him/her to recruit the rest.

We found this much easier because we had a clear plan to articulate for the team in terms of our company goals.

We ensured that everyone in the team had a variable element of their compensation. We paid basic salaries monthly and quarterly variables based on a mixed scorecard of company and individual performance. Our aim in doing this, initially viewed with some scepticism I have to confess, was to more closely align our team with the company's goals. This worked, once everyone had seen that they were fairly applied and promptly paid. We used market data from Ciklum's HR department to allow us to set our salary levels at the 50th percentile for 'average' performers and then paid more or less based on individual performance.

I've read a lot about managing an offshore team. My experience is that it is no different to managing a team of developers anywhere. Certainly, each country has its own cultural norms and that has some bearing on the minutiae but the fundamentals remain.
The key issue is spending time and getting to know people. Where language is an issue, it's always going to take longer for the team to pick-up on the company's ethos and objectives and you have to achieve that. You need to bring people into your company and really treat them as part of it if that's how you want them to feel and behave; a visit for one day every month won't do that!

Since language and the nuances of it will be an issue, it is always best to have clear policies which are written down. It gives people time to digest the content instead of stressing their translation skills to such a degree that they entirely miss the point of what you're trying to say. I used to give quarterly reviews on the company's performance but make sure that I also handed out the slides. There was considerable interest from the team although quite a lot of that might have been because the performance affected each individual's variable payout.

Our team worked the last four weekends of 2008 to launch our new Business to Business product. They did this whilst also knowing that the company was in severe danger of having to cut down due to lack of funds early in 2009.
The product that they built, in record time, is, we believe, the best social media monitoring tool available on the market today.

As such, I would certainly recommend any company looking to build a technology team to consider doing so in Ukraine with Ciklum. You can build a world-class team for less money AND you remove 90% of the administrative hassle and, for a small business, that's a huge incentive. One invoice per month for the entire team is infinitely preferable to having to deal with the complexities of tax legislation, employee insurance, social security payments etc., etc. Further you get an access to a pool of candidates that you wouldn't be able to attract on your own.

Reference date: March 2009

Using Peak Resources

During a critical period of our project, we urgently needed an additional resource to help on difficult technical issues. We needed an high level experienced web developer familiar with the tricky technologies used in our project (advanced JavaScript, complex HTML pages, complex CSS, browser compatibility, graphical design ...).

We contacted Peak Resources and very rapidly get some CV corresponding to our request. We selected and interviewed a candidate who was able to rapidly join our team. His professionalism, technical expertise and skills to rapidly integrate a team and understand the project details dramatically improved our team performance and we were able to deliver on schedule. He also involved himself deeper in the project and provided us some very valuable advices on other topics.

For us, the experience of working with Peak Resources was very valuable and no doubt we will contact them whenever we have needs for peak resources.

Christophe Lemoine, CTO

Reference date: 2009