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Inside the Belarus Main office of Andersen Company is located in Belarus (Minsk). Almost all members of our team are citizens of Belarus and are living and working in this country. Belarus is our motherland. This note is about Belarus for non Belarusians. It’s created for you in order to let you see the country where Andersen produces software. Before to start, we placed a couple of facts from wiki to acquaint you with the general information about this country. Belarus is located in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the east and Poland to the west. The population consists of 9,724,700 citizens. The nation's capital Minsk, is home to 1,741,400 of Belarus's. Country's two official languages are Belarusian and Russian. National currency is Byelorussian ruble that is ~2900/1 to dollar. Since 1990, on the base of scientific and academic infrastructure of republic, Information technology industry began to develop. The present day, according to Forbes magazine, the average percent software development per head in Belarus is higher than in world leading country India. So for now, that is enough with statistics. We thought a lot of how to make this article more alive. The idea was to write it as if it was a guide for a foreign visitor. On the other hand, if you still read this, it is very likely that some day you’ll decide to come to Belarus and this article will play its duty. Arrival The first place you will see in Belarus, if you’ll get there by plane, is a national airport Minsk-2 (Rus) Airport is located at 42 kilometers from the city so it will take you 40-50 minutes to get to the city. The quality of the road is amazing, besides you will enjoy a great number of local sightseeing on the borders. The building that looks like a diamond is the National Library. People in Belarus do read much. According to the original idea, the library had to reflect the light by its wall glasses and shine like a diamond. But something went wrong. Maybe someone stole the money for good qaulity glasses or the construction didn’t allow this, but now, behind the wall glasses you can see the wall itself with small windows and white bricks. For this reason a miracle of an infinite treasure of knowledge sort of disappears. Hotels There are three hotels in the city where it is possible to stay. Actually, these are three the best ones. There are other not bad hotels but for the first time let’s consider only these three. The first one, Europe is really good. The second, Crown Plaza is good as well. The third, Minsk, is not bad, but you won’t find there anything special Our company Andersen office is located nearly in the center of the city and not so far from any of these hotels I mentioned above. The house, where we are located, is rather old administrative building, but in beauty spot of the Minsk. First picture it’s our office from the river side. Two others are Gorkey park that is located close to the doors of our office. Currently Andersen consists of 22 employees, average age is 25 years old and most of employees are men. To be continued How to sell IT services In our press releases we usually write that in Andersen we develop and implement software. It is true, but only partially. We are also constantly searching for new customers and selling them our services. And this article is about experience and skills that we have achieved in this process. In 8 points I will try to cover the most important things which can help you to convince your potential client that you are the right company to work with. 1) Be Competitive. Not only in IT In order to be successful in selling IT services you should be more competent than a customer in the business sphere that you offer your customer to automate. It’s necessary to be interesting for the client. You should be able to generate not less than two solutions for each problem your customer has. If you are experienced in his industry (not mean in IT) and your experience is interesting for him, he will sooner or later order your services. 2) Understand and be understandable You should establish such a communication between your and your client which will make it comfortable for your partner to cooperate with you. It’s important to use understandable terms while talking to the customer and it is also necessary to sort of develop his intelligent level. In such case a person won’t feel like a fool but will feel the nuance of euphoria that arises with the immersion in an unknown area. For example, when a person learns a first word in a foreign language he usually feels a kind of inspiration. People become full of enthusiasm and want to learn more. 3) Learn the language of your client Before the meeting or at the first meeting you should study the psychological features of the customer. For example, for some people it is better if new information is presented in numbers as they rely on them and understand them better, thus your presentation should consist of various tables and diagrams done in Excel format. Another type of people perceive new information when it is visualized . In this case the best decision is to use a Power Point presentation with metaphorical images that would symbolize nodes of the system. In any case you need to adapt your material for the customer; it means to understand his way of thinking, and talk to him on his language. Otherwise it will look like a conversation between a deaf and a blind. 4) Be honest In my opinion it is important to be frank and open. If you couldn’t express your mind honestly about something (as for IT it can be a question of quality), you better change the topic and speak about something more suitable for an honest conversation. Be sure, your interlocutor feels whether you doubt something you are talking about or or speak honestly. Sometimes it will be a good idea to impress a client with WoW effect. Usually the same projects are sold by not less then two or even three companies except your company. For most of them to take part in the presales is a routine. And when you propose to your potential client to work out a small prototype of his system will impress him a lot. Your proposal becomes the most interesting among other unvaried featureless business proposals. The customer will be intrigued. 5) “you are absolutely right” It is important to avoid contradiction by all means . My first boss began his study of English by learning the phrase: «You are absolutely right». Actually, this is a common phrase that means nothing but the main idea is usually in the second part of the sentence which starts after the word «but». For example, “You absolutely right setting up such demands, BUT the cost of the project haven’t included this”. After this phrase the area for maneuvers is free. After the phrase «the cost of project hadn’t been implied your supplementary demand» you are likely to find yourself in a conflict situation. 6) Be ALWAYS well prepared It is important during the presentation to notice when a customer became tired. For example, if you see that your client shifted his look from the flip-chart and began to look around for no reason, that means that your client might be bored. If he starts doing something else, he is not interested in your speech. I remember one presentation when one of the participants of the meeting fell asleep and even was snoring. In this case your situation is not a good one. You need either to change the style presenting the information , or start presenting it with more energy , talk more metaphorically, or even try to involve someone in a dialogue. If nothing helps then you should have been better prepared You should give a customer a feeling of importance. By managing the money (even the corporate money), he becomes a man with money. And people with money demand respectful attitude , They want that their status was understood . How could you make them feel their own significance? A good way is to behave obsequiously. An ability to be obsequious without much efforts is a great gift. 7) Tense forms can also make a difference Although you may not agree with me. During a presentation it is important to use verbs in the present tense. For example: "the system menu loads" "the installer starts”. Even if you do not have any system menu, nor the installer. This is correct in a sense that the customer tries on a situation where he begins to "engage" with you. And if he starts repeating after you: "We load", "We install", this means that he has just chosen you as a business partner. 8) Do not over praise yourself! When you advertise a product it is desirable not to over use superlative forms. It means that you should not use such words as “the best product, good product, super product” too often. Sometimes it is even useful to mention some small disadvantages of the product. For example: “Our program is good, but there is a problem of placing your employees who become useless after implementation”. Usually this kind of problem is called a pleasant bustle. I am sure the customer will be happy to solve it. Quality, Developers and Testers: what is the best ratio? 28.08.2009 In software development industry it is often discussed if it is necessary to have quality assurance on the projects. And what is the most effective presence of testing part in projects. In other words what is the most effective ratio of programmers and testers? The ratio of programmers and testers can be different depending on a project. This doesn’t mean that large number of testers will provide their work effectively. The most effective average proportion is where a number of testers and developers is considered as 1 to 2. In order to show this, let’s imagine a project with 4 developers working on it. For the best ratio of quality we should employ 2 testers. This example can be successfully illustrated in the picture: When we don’t have testers on the project, only 10% of bugs can be found by programmers. When we were young and enthusiastic (but not as clever as today), starting our new project, we thought that well motivated and qualified programmers can provide their work in a best way. But it’s obvious that everybody can make mistakes, and few programmers can find these mistakes. If we have 2 testers they will approximately find 85% of bugs. Here is the rule that it is impossible to find 100% of bugs. If we employ 3 testers they will find 90% of bugs, but their work won’t be effective and will cost more money. The price of each found error will be higher. Thus, we will achieve the best ratio of efforts and the best quality if we have 2 testers and 4 programmers. Every additional tester will find some bugs but general price of his work is higher than effectiveness. Only on vitally important projects such as healthcare and financial projects this ineffective (we say here ineffective meaning expensive) work should be applied, because potential defect can be very expensive. The same situation comes up when we talk of the time spent on a bug search: if we spend too much time on testing, it will become ineffective. So, the task of testing is very important in the context of software development. We understand that the ideal ratio of testers and programmers can be applied only to the average projects. But the main idea is that the cost of the quality assurance may take up to 50 percent of software development cost. Anna Hrabun Why does Quality cost so much? 21.08.2009 Every year in a software development branch of IT business, significant amount of money is spent on quality. Why is quality so expensive? Is quality so important? Why do companies spend money on Quality Assurance and Software Testing Departments maintenance? When I think of it I come to conclusion that software quality verification sometimes is even more expensive than software development itself. Sometimes the quality of software means everything. There are a lot of examples of such systems: the software for railway and air transportation, banking and financial software, healthcare. If something is done wrong in this kind of systems, and if it is not found and corrected on time, it may lead to serious problems in healthcare, or even result in numerous casualties. Often a number of testers taking part in project implementation is more than a number of developers. But every found bug will eventually save money or a company’s reputation. I took part in this kind of projects. The team had been working on software for medicine distribution for 2 years. There were 9 people who tested the project and only 4 programmers. The price of drugs was rather high, thus a testing team spent much time carrying out their tests with precise care in order to find all the defects that could affect the system. The main requirement for such systems is high accuracy of calculations. And testing engineers repeat the same actions again and again to make sure that everything is correctly calculated. If system had a bug, patient would have received an overdose and possibly died. That’s why system and corporations use every possibility to make their products of high quality and spend money on keeping software testing engineers’ army. And it’s only one example of healthcare software importance. So, the quality costs much money, and it’s reasonable to pay for it. On the other hand, we should remember that there are no products without bugs; sometimes it is impossible to find all of them. Taking this fact in consideration, there are Customers, who do order software development in our company but… refuse software testing services. They think that they can save money this way. But I would like to say “A Miser Pays Twice” and the best way is to verify software carefully even if it requires additional efforts. In the times of financial crisis this truth is especially topical, because company’s reputation and brand name becomes an essential guarantee of products reliability and sustainability. Anna Hrabun How IT could generate improvements in your business. 14.08.2009 To generate significant bottom line improvements in business performance, IT must be an originator of business improvement ideas rather than simply an implementer. Practically it means active business position of IT department managers and self-interest to improve a situation of company top management. This role requires IT staff to gain deeper business knowledge to accompany their technical skills and to work more closely with their business colleagues to seek improvement opportunities. Business has to be firmly tied with IT infrastructure in order quickly to find effective solutions. IT has to be applied to the areas of the business that provide the greatest contribution to the bottom line. Think of areas such as sales and product development rather than HR and automation clerical functions. Other words apply your resources in the first place to the business spheres that generate income. Prioritizing of IT improvements is very important, sometimes even critical for the business success. Implement a job rotation program that places IT staff in business positions to gain a better understanding of how the company operates and to seek opportunities to improve the technology. Outsource off-site IT Company to gain Cutting Edge IT technologies. Also it is important to compare performance of internal IT department with the performance of outsourcing IT organization. It is possible to organize by setting similar but not the same tasks for both of them. If an internal department loses the competition it is a message to think about its improvement. Alexander Khomich Shall project to be outsourced or it is better to performs it themselves. 08.08.2009 While advertising Andersen services I often have to answer to potential customer the same question (by the way, one of the most important). "Why it is more profitable to order your services than to organize my own IT team that performs the project". Here I’ll try to give the answer. Also I would like to highlight your attention that I speak about software development projects as well as implementation of a pre-built solution of software suppliers, but not any kind of technical IT support, data center operations or application maintenance. The characteristics of the projects will help determine if they are a candidate for outsourcing or not. While there is no "ideal" development project suitable for outsourcing, a project that has one or more of these traits is worth considering. Generic functionality. Generic projects are perfect outsourcing candidates. Outsourcing options are plentiful, the pool of consultants familiar with the functionality is larger, solutions are well honed, and pre-built components are likely to abound. Examples of these projects are: Accounting, Warehouse, Budgeting and so on. Custom, but highly specified projects. The more precise the project specifications, the more amenable the project is to outsourcing. The outsourcer knows exactly what it must do to perform its work, the deliverables expected, the functionality needed, the timeframes required and expectations between the parties are tightly aligned. Routine projects. The customer invites outsourcer to implement a big but routine task. For example development of data interface between applications, improvement of reporting, QA tasks and so on. Sometime project-oriented type of work could be changed for time sheet labor. During the outsourcing project, it is highly recommended for the customer to organize its own project team that will be responsible for the future project maintenance; of course it’s more applicable for the complex projects. I do not recommend to outsource the following type of projects: Risky projects. In this kind of projects it is very important for company to manage development of process itself because of the high risk to lose an IT competence or unique technologies that project comprises. Examples of these projects are: a billing system of cellular operator, software of stock exchange. Specific projects. This class of projects is tightly tied with the science or some other complex calculations. In such projects staff is not always even pure programmers, but scientists that have knowledge to automate its own calculations. These principles of project splitting are very simple, but they give an idea how to act in situation when you are not completely sure what to prefer. Alexander Khomich

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