One of the mindset differences that often lead to issues in cooperations across cultures is quality versus speed. I believe this is a cultural difference that needs to receive attention in any offshore collaboration. It can result both from a …
The past years I have been experimenting a lot with scrum in our offshore and nearshore cooperations. One of the most challenging parts of distributed scrum (the variant of scrum where team members cooperate from different locations) is organizing the …
I have spent a good number of years encouraging both small and large business owners to take advantage of outsourcing, by hiring outsourced employees to run certain business functions. I have even written a book on the subject called …
In this article, I would like to share (a short version of) my personal story with you. I have done a short interview with myself: What drew me to this market? An odd combination of events. Short after the millennium …
As most of you are likely busy planning and strategizing for 2013, I want to plant an idea. When you think about offshoring, your first idea will likely be ‘ah, low costs’. But is this really the case and is …
Some small business owners wrongly assume that offshore outsourcing services are for the fortune 500 companies alone. Also, the mere thought of entrusting their business functions to an offshore vendor disturbs small business owners. Yet, small businesses are one of …
In my work as an agile and lean consultant, there’s sometimes a lot of discussion about “processes”. People I work with use different definitions of processes. Agile teams sometimes resist to processes, when they refer to the agile manifesto that …
I started in the offshoring/nearshoring/outsourcing market in 2005 and in that year, I already heard people share negative stories about offshoring. Today, in 2012, this is still the case, maybe even more, as more people have experience. It surprises me …
Last week, I had a conversation with somebody about the differences between Indian and Eastern European programmers. Or maybe we spoke about programmers in general. The thing I find always hard in our business is to answer questions about these …
I am reading a book called ‘100% succesvolle IT-projecten’, written by Klaas Jung and Gerard van de Looi. They write about the key success factors in IT projects. One of the chapters that stand out for me is about relationships and openness. …
When I decided that I’m really going to India for my Internship at Bridge Global, one of the leading software solutions provider with smart IT team building solutions, I had no idea what to expect. For me India was an …
Some years ago the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) published the technical report CMMI or Agile: Why Not Embrace Both, to describe that CMMI and agile can co-exist. I was surprised that such a report was needed. All the projects that …