One Accountable Person

When an outsourced project goes wrong, you hear about it last, because three people stand between you and the work.

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Each softens the bad news a little before passing it on, so it reaches you weeks late. The fix is one person who answers to you for the work and writes to you every working day.

If you have outsourced software, you may know the story. The first call is excellent: senior people, sharp questions, a confident plan. Then the work starts, and the people from that call are no longer on it. The weekly status says green for six weeks. Then it says red, and the problem it describes has been growing since week two.

The industry has a name for it: the watermelon project, green on the outside and red all the way through. Plenty of firms have lived through one and decided outsourcing doesn’t work for them.

The layers between you and the work

You are outside the last ring. Each ring is a reasonable job done by a reasonable person, and together they work as a filter: bad news softens at every layer and reaches you weeks old and expensive. The engineer who could have told you on day one what was wrong is the one person you never speak to.

Distance is not the problem. Time zones are not the problem. The problem is the layers, and that no one in them answers to you for the work itself.

What Shan learned leading an offshore team

Our founder, Shan Peiris, learned this by leading a team like it. At MJ Hudson, a London fund-services group, he led an offshore team of nine from 2021 to 2023 (the team that rebuilt six of the firm’s fourteen applications) and ran its sprints himself as Scrum master, with a demo to the C-suite after every increment.

The lesson he brought to neesh is the shape of this essay. When the person accountable for the work is the person the client talks to, and the client sees working software at every step, the distance stops mattering. What makes outsourced work go wrong is the layers, not the miles.

A plan every morning, a report every evening

One person answers for the work: named at the start, reachable by phone, and still the person you deal with after the contract is signed. Every working day, that person writes to you twice:

• In the morning, the plan. What is being worked on today, and anything needed from you.
• In the evening, the report. What got done, what is in progress, what is blocked, and anything that needs your decision.

Each is short, in plain words, and read in two minutes. There is a sample on How We Work.

A daily report can look like overhead. It is the cheapest way to hear bad news early. A problem reported on the Tuesday it is found is small, with a day’s context around it. Raised in a status meeting four weeks later, it is large, and nobody remembers how it started. A report that says “blocked” on Tuesday is worth more than six weeks of green.

The weekly demo keeps the daily report honest. Every week you see working software rather than a slide, so a report that claims progress has to show it, and a gap surfaces in days rather than months.

What to ask any team you hire, including us

• Who is the one person who answers to me for this work, and can I call them directly?
• Will I get a written plan and report every working day, or a status meeting once a week?
• Will I see working software every week, or a presentation about it?
• If someone on the team doesn’t work out, what happens, and how fast?
• How much notice do I need to give to stop?

Our answers are the terms of dedicated teams, stream 03 of our services: one named person, a plan every morning and a report every evening, a working demo every week, a replacement guarantee, and thirty days’ notice either way. Any team worth hiring should answer all five as plainly.