Why We Live Proactiveness And Creativity at Prisma Softwares
“No proactiveness, wrong time zone, no interpersonal relationship” – this is what some of our clients told us about their earlier outsourcing experiences. Have you too been looking for a team in Eastern Europe, India or Philippines that would work hand in hand with your in-house developers and designers in the US?
Why certain conditions must be fulfilled to make outsourcing work
When you allow a third party to develop or add value to your product, you basically need them to be as proactive and creative as your in-house team or otherwise your growth is at risk to be slowed down. Training and aligning your third party support can cost you more time than doing the work yourself. This issue applies to both “team renting” (long-term employees that remain on a third party’s payroll) as well as project based collaborations with milestones, sprints and a formal engagement letter. At Prisma we are providing project based web development for ecommerce business in Magento and Shopify – therefore we asked our clients what they were most worried about during projects.
Ideas and creativity drive your business
We all know that it is ideas and creativity that drive your business – whether coding functionalities or designing your product or platform. Your clients appreciate that your product is different, more creative, more trendy. Of course as a US business owner or director of a creative agency, you definitely need to take the lead when it comes to ideas and creativity. However, many of our clients told us that in practice there are limits and that they clearly depend on their third party’s proactiveness. In design and front-end these limitations are tighter than for back-end as logics, rules and filters can be specified easier than images, animations, logos and color sets.
What is proactiveness?
Proactiveness refers to self-initiated behavior with the goal of solving a problem before it even occurred. A proactive person is someone who acts in advance of a situation that is about to occur instead of adjusting to a situation. The contrary to proactiveness is reactivity, a reactive person only reacts to the past rather than anticipating what can happen in the future. An employee who only shows reactivity behaviour patterns may be looking to disempower himself, either driven by risk aversion or simply a lack of motivation.
Share the same time zone
Ensure that you share sufficient core hours with your outsourced team. An outsourced employee who opens up his laptop while your in-house employee has dinner cannot exchange their ideas the same way as if they shared a time zone. Potentially your third party has worked on a task the entire day that will have to be discarded later as your in-house employee reviewed it too late.
Our East Coast clients at Prisma occasionally told us that communication with us was more efficient than with their in-house West Coast team. A few clients have made it to Medellin to meet us and realized their flight from Miami was just 3:30 hours while seeing their San Francisco staff in person would eat 6 hours of their time.
Use on-site moments to build a personal connection
Most US ecommerce businesses or creative agencies have never met their Eastern European or Indian developers, it is just too far away. At Prisma we try to create a working relationship that feels just like the ones you have in-house. Some clients have visited us in Medellin – a city that was ranked 3rd by Timeout for quality of life (see Forbes) – and combine vacation with work. Their preferred place to stay is El Poblado, famous for its bars, coffee places and night out opportunities. We usually show them around and let them dive into Colombian culture of coffee and salsa. We believe that concepts, processes and strategies should sometimes be discussed over a beer – and Medellin has plenty of options here.
Of course our team does not hesitate when it comes to visit you on-site in the US. Our Canadian head of projects Sami Derian has worked with a wide range of web agencies in Montreal and New York and is happy to attend spontaneous on-site meetings on both East and West Coast. In Medellin my colleagues Natalia Aldana, Business Developer for Adobe Commerce/Magento development and Valentina Lopera Gomez, Product Manager will be happy to meet you.
Drop by and say “Hi” via info@prismasoftwares.com!
Conne Gil
Software Engineer at Prisma Softwares
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