Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net (Part 4)

SM: Here’s another question for you. You have talked a lot about bidding for projects, and you seem to be bidding for a lot of projects on a daily basis. Can you talk a bit about the bidding process? What do you do internally? Do you have a dedicated team who sit and monitor the projects that come up and bid on them? And how do you manage the process?

SD: The bidding process is very simple. You need to be honest and provide a clear picture of your understanding of projects to customers. Usually, outsourcing portals such as Freelancer.com only allow a single login, meaning only one person can bid using a company’s login details at a time. We have a business development team of four people who work round the clock and participate in the bidding process on various portals. The team in turn reports to me.

SM: So, basically, all the time, you have somebody monitoring the bidding process.

SD: Yes, that’s a must have, because the market is quite competitive, and we need to be quick in responding to various project postings. Continuous monitoring is required in order to shortlist projects falling in our skill set, to prepare a brief summary about them, to present them to customers and to communicate with them in a timely fashion. We focus on website design, website programming and graphic designing projects.

SM: Yes, you have matured. In the beginning, you were under bidding and getting into trouble. Now, you have enough experience to not under bid.

SD: Yes. We don’t under bid.  We only take those projects which fall in our skill set. We communicate clearly with our customers and agree on a brief scope of work before accepting any order. We need to establish an ethical relationship with the customers.

SM: What about specifications? What process do you use to transmit specifications from your customers to your team?

SD: In the process of bidding, it is difficult to prepare a detailed specification due to the competitive nature of projects and a limited bidding period. Once the project is awarded to us, we have a system in place to define milestones, tasks in every milestone and targets. We prepare wireframes, database diagrams, fow chart and multiple quality checklists.

SM: Right. But that’s only in the bidding process. If you win the project, and you take on the project, what method do you use to manage the projects properly?

SD:

We have a dedicated development team who manages our ERP system and a comprehensive project management system. Our online project management system is www.smartinfosys.in. We have always believed in updating the customer regularly, which is very important in the service industry. We prepare a detailed  proposal statement in which we define the milestones and tasks involved in every milestone. Every milestone is allotted a target date. The task report is clearly communicated to our customers and their feedback is invited to avoid any confusion in project execution. We also prepare a detailed database diagram and wireframe for programming projects. In the case of Web designing projects, our designing head studies the requirements of the customers and prepares a few hand drawn sketches which are then produced by our experienced website and graphic designers.

We have multiple programming teams; every team is led by a team coordinator. The project documentation is handed over to the team coordinators who in turn allot projects to programmers. The team coordinators regularly monitor the projects. A project progress report is provided for the customer every second day. The work in development is uploaded on test server www.smarthost4u.com. We have always kept our customers updated about their projects’ progress.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer Sanjay Dange, Co-Founder and COO of Smartinfosys.net
1 2 3 4 5