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August 10, 2003

Going Offshore Without Going Off the Deep End

It seems like everyone's doing offshore, but not everyone is doing it right

by Rajan Chandras

Continued from Page 1

Preparing For The Journey

As you develop your offshore strategy, there are measures needed at your end to make the partnership successful. The following steps will help you successfully build up (and build upon) offshore partnerships.

Appoint an offshore advisor. Appoint a key internal resource in your organization to be the point-person for spearheading the offshore initiative. The offshore advisor (OA) isn't required to sell the initiative, and won't bear project responsibility or accountability. This role will rest within the project — for example, with the project management or steering committee. The job of the OA is to understand the offshore paradigm; present its value to the business; select vendors; set up policies, procedures, and guidelines for offshore projects; and manage the vendor relationships. In many ways, this position is akin to a purchasing manager, and essential attributes required of the OA will include a good working relationship with the business, good understanding of the software development life cycle, good negotiation skills, willingness to travel, and, last but not least, a high degree of cultural sensitivity.

Encourage, don't enforce. Present both the value and challenges of offshore development to your business managers — and then let them decide. Enforcing a policy of across-the-board offshore development is likely to create side effects detrimental to overall business objectives — side effects such as a reduced degree of ownership in projects and a decreased overall return on investment from offshore projects.

Include your own IT people. Ensure that your own IT department and your strategic enterprise consultants actively participate in the partnership. Bypassing your own employees makes it an "us vs. them" situation and is likely to alienate the very employees that have been the foundation of your success this far.

Instead, make your IT employees stakeholders in the successes and failures of offshore projects: Mix and match your in-house IT skills with offshore talent in your offshore projects. For example, use some of your own analysts or developers; exchange your in-house and offshore resources for an appropriate duration; and bring together an advisory roundtable of decision makers — in architecture, infrastructure, applications, and project management — together with their offshore counterparts.

Choose your weapons. Where possible, settle upon a common set of tools that will be the default for all offshore projects — typically for areas such as project management, information modeling, and software testing. Using standard tools will flatten the learning curve for these areas across projects, while allowing project teams to focus on learning technologies that are core to project delivery, such as development tools and operating environments. At the same time, since project requirements vary, use of the "default toolset" should be optional and left to the project teams.

Ensure close cooperation. Communication is your key to success, and it will require careful planning and some expenditure. Ensure that your offshore team is as well connected by phones and voice messaging as you are. Don't assume it is. Do you need your key offshore personnel to have after-hours connectivity? If so, include pagers or mobile phones in the budget. Set up video and audio conferencing. Plan for visits in both directions. Ensure email systems are compatible. Set up systems (such as file transfer protocol) to move data files.

Overcome cultural barriers. When your offshore colleague says "Give me a ring tomorrow," chances are she's requesting you phone her, rather than asking you to marry her! Cultural differences make for great humor in both directions, but success in the long run results from mutual understanding and mutual respect. Spend efforts, time, and, if needed, money in ensuring that cultural differences are mutually understood and accepted.

The buck stops with you. The ultimate point of responsibility and accountability for the project should be someone onshore — that is, a local person or group, not an offshore entity. This measure prevents accountability slips and appoints an available contact for any issues that arise before, during, and after the project.

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Economic and business trends across the world are leading businesses to attain a global perspective on resourcing business-critical software development and IT-enabled services. The companies that realize this are at a crossroads. They can view the use of offshore IT resources as a market-reactive, cost-cutting, and opportunistic measure. Or they can use the opportunity to integrate offshore resources into the fabric of their enterprise IT strategy. Factors such as those presented here will assist you in making the most appropriate determination for your organization.

Rajan Chandras [rajan.chandras@csc.com] is a principal consultant with the New York Metro offices of CSC Consulting. The opinions expressed here are his own.