I recently heard a great presentation of Amanda Crouch, partner at Global Business Partnership Alliance .She identified 7 steps that lead to real collaboration in an outsourcing relationship. An interesting statistic that underscores the importance of ‘relationships’: 70% of performance/delivery problems have …
If we look back at the current era in about 15-20 years, will we be talking about a revolution when we talk about offshoring? Could offshoring become so ingrained in the way we do business, that it truly changes the …
During the Talk About IT event in Amsterdam on May 24th, Peter Hilton and Michael Franken shared their view on how to go about this way of managing teams and projects. Hugo Messer, organizer of Talk About IT, shortly got …
It is not easy to make offshoring work. It is not easy to work across borders, cultures and languages. If you have been involved in (managing) an offshore team, you probably had days that you were pulling out your …
I read and talk a lot about offshoring and global staffing and one discussion frequently pops up: is it good or bad to hire people from India? Does it destroy jobs in my home country? There is quite some …
What’s your opinion on encouraging programmers in a company to involve in Software Community sites and Discussion forums? (a) Good for knowledge sharing and self improvement OR (b) Waste of time and that leads to less productivity I believe …
Often times we surround ourselves with people like us found in ‘likely places’. For instance, if we like biking, we join a group that goes biking. If we like public speaking, we join toastmasters. If we like volleyball or cricket, …
Right from my first day as an account manager with Bridge Global I knew in which beautiful surrounding I am now working and I got some further impression on my last amazing, breathtaking holidays. They left a feeling of …
People who engage in offshoring, have a natural, human inclination to ‘just start communicating’. My experience has made me think a lot about the most effective way of communicating in an offshoring context. If you are involved in managing an …
Even if you have set up a small company global sourcing can be added to your purchasing strategy. Sourcing and outsourcing is not only a possibility for large companies, small business owners can have the same benefits of outsourcing some …
Offshore initiatives offer many benefits, particularly on the financial side, and also come with several risks. As with any major initiative, developing a plan to mitigate the risks is essential. A source of risk that is seldom considered, however, is …
A friend sent me this Dilbert illustration; I had to study it several times to conclude what’s the main message to me. You could interpret it in many ways; for me it drives home one thing: the success of offshoring depends on people, not on ‘bestshore, nearshore, rightshore, offshore or farshore’. The offshoring industry has come up with many confusing definitions to describe a simple thing: hiring people from another country to do a project or (parts of) a process. (For an interesting thought article on terminology, read this article of Gavin Bowden-Hall).