Interview: Shirley Xian

Q: Hi Shirley, as you are the person in charge of web development department, could you please introduce a little bit about each members in your team?

Shirley: Well... everyone in our team has his strong suits, and we are very good at team work. Start with myself, I am very familiar with the web development domain, especially the requirements analysis and web application development.

Ma Haifeng (Eric) is accomplished in web application too, especially the development of network communication. He also makes himself master of windows service and XML, and is proficient at interface design.

Yan Yi (Yiphone) is good at widget development and enterprise application, familiar with JavaScript, experienced in transportation industry.

Sensitive to art and beauty, Zhao Yu is adept at Flash development.

Song Choulin is a new comer in our team, but he is competent for various tasks such as flash development.

Fu Lin specializes in web application too.

So in brief, all of us are extremely familiar with all kinds of technologies that are widely and often used in web development such as .NET Framework, Ajax, CSS, HTML, etc. except Song Choulin who is a specialized flash developer.

Q: From the client's perspective, it is really hard to find the right people. The clients really need to know if the skillsets we have are in line with their requirements. They are also concerned about too much freedom is granted to the outsourced team; they are concerned about whether this team is productive and really cost-efficient; they do not want to pay for engineers going off and creating software not needed by them. So my question is, how do you guarantee your productivity, efficiency, and high quality of your work? I know many clients have given positive comments on your performance so far. So there must be some tips that you can share with us about how you perform to the satisfactory level and finally get very high customer satisfaction index. Could you please talk about that?

Shirley: I think it is completely unnecessary to worry about whether the developers you hire are not qualified for your project because first, we recruit people very cautiously and strictly; second, we recommend people to the clients based on overall project requirements and strategic development plans in the long term; third, we supervise people how they work in order to further make sure that they have the right direction and get all the tough technical problems solved in a timely manner; fourth, as per the company policy, we do have backup solutions to ensure that the interests of our clients will not be harmed even if the engineers couldn't perform to satisfactory level. All in all, you don't need to worry about the engineers' qualifications.

With respect to the efficiency assurance, we do have several methods to make clients rest assured of that.

• The project manager will submit work report on weekly basis to sum up the progress during the week, quality of output, and the minute of communication between the clients and engineers. This work report includes every single problem that we have encountered and how we fixed it. The PM will also exchange opinions with the clients for the sake of better performance in the future.
• Every engineer in his project team can submit daily work report as long as the client requires. If the client does not think daily work report is a must, the engineers will submit daily report to the team leader and exchanges ideas with each other.
• Based on clients' requirements, we will deliver the source code on daily/weekly/periodical basis so the progress of project and quality and output will be absolutely transparent to the clients. By this way, our work efficiency is under the supervision of the client.

Nova is striving for really high customer satisfaction and aiming at to be the most reliable outsourcing vendor for our global clients. So we sincerely welcome the clients to give any of their opinions and comments in order to improve our service quality on a continuous basis.

Q: During your cooperation with the clients, you must have encountered some problems or tough situations. How did you overcome the difficulties?

Shirley: Commonly speaking, most difficulties come from the new clients because it is our first time to get acquainted with each other and work tightly with each other. You know the mutual trust is based on a successful cooperation experience. We have not worked with each other before, which always makes the new client have some concerns more or less. So the transparency of cooperation is very important for us to win more trust from new clients. After a period of cooperation, everything goes perfectly with our collaboration.

Another tough situation would be, the client himself is not a technical staff or he does not have software development experience. However, the clients don't always know what they need at the beginning of a project. Especially when you are developing a new software product, you never know what the detailed project requirements are. Under such circumstances, we need to convince the client that the requirement analysis phase and development of a prototype can help us have more clues about the final product, and more detailed requirements can be easily further clarified. As we have already accumulated fairly rich experience in developing all kinds of web sites and web applications, our most experienced engineers are able to help clients gather project requirements and come up with optimal solutions. So no matter you know about software development or not, you can rest assured that we are the most reliable offshore partner!