Hearing that a US Client hires 20, 30, 50 and even 100 IT specialists from Russia, Belarus or other countries of the CIS and Eastern Europe is not surprising anymore.

Nevertheless, when a Client makes the decision about where to hire developers: should they be inhouse developers, developers from local companies, or outsource developers from Russia; there are always doubts and questions "how not to miscalculate?", "how to find reliable ones?", "who can lead me to success?".

Our case will tell you the story of our Client who outsourced, what challenges they faced and how they found the solutions. We will also share our 4 insights that helped the Client to succeed – develop a high-class IT project and become an official partner of a transnational company. We are extremely proud of this project because we managed to put together a top-notch team, create flawless processes and help the Client reach their goal.

How did it start?

The Client is from the USA and the CEO is an official partner of the biggest transnational company that works in the field of development of positioning systems based on signals from global navigation satellite systems with total turnover more than $1.3 billion.

The Client's task was to develop a system for managing construction sites as well as objects in different spheres. At the beginning the Client and his team developed the design and specifications, they also coded, but they needed to code more and more. They decided to outsource because they didn't want to enlarge the in-house team (that meant organizing a search, hiring, renting, motivation, promotion etc.)

They decided to go to UpWork (oDesk those days)

Insight #1 For finding and evaluating IT providers, use the UpWork platform. We highly recommend you to see the reviews about teams/companies on UpWork, even if you found it somewhere else. Is it possible to find a team of more than 30 people? It is! Our Client did!

Our team has been working on oDesk (UpWork) since 2003. We were the first developers of the platform oDesk and were considered the best long before there were ratings :) That's where we met our Client. We offered him the most suitable solution for his small task. We then did the task 4 times faster than the Client expected.

Insight #2 Start with something small. Our Client didn't waste time approving a large job before starting. He started with a simple thing – a small PoC task. That is one of the best ways to start the process with any team.

After we did the task, we were flooded with new jobs. We did this for more than 10 years while our team continued to grow, almost reaching 40 people.

We started the project and supported it for many years: the system has 21,755,588 weekly queries with support of complex search results exceeding 270 searches/second in production.

Did we have any challenges?

Our team faced not only the challenges of interacting with the Client's team, that supported some parts of the project, but also technological difficulties. For example, there was a moment where we needed to migrate the system to the cloud because the response time was longer than 30 seconds.

What did the developers do? They introduced Amazon Web Services and created their own file system that improved the whole system.

And what did the Client do? He was deep in the process and its details trying to find the solution with us.

Insight #3 Don't let go of the project after starting. If you wanted to hire a top notch, extremely famous construction company to build your new house, you would have to dive into all the details, control the building process etc. The same is true for IT-projects: keep being involved all the time.

By the way, as for "control the building process", the Client started visiting us to give workshops before launching the development of some large modules. And our representatives flew to the USA to demonstrate the product and brainstorm some new components.

Insight #4 Have offline meetings. If it is impossible, use your camera while communicating.

How did the story end?

It didn't end!

Our Client became an official partner of a transinternational company, for whom the project had been developed. The project, being released from its active phase, was given to the office of support of the company in India.

We continued working with the Client on new wonderful projects which he initiated with his partners.