I speak to many people about offshoring and nearshoring. One of the central themes that come up is the move from ‘providing people’ to ‘R&D offshoring’ and ‘collaborative innovation’. Instead of providing people for specific customer projects, companies look at joint innovation.
Products that are developed for a customer, can be sold in the local market of the offshore provider. Software that is developed by the offshore provider for the local market or another customer in another country, can be sold in the country of the customer.
The past year we’ve been working on an online platform, Bridge Teams. I have done a lot of research on outsourcing/recruitment/hiring platforms and would like to get your feedback on the use of this type of services.
Bridge Teams enables companies to select (a team of) A-player developers. Users can find detailed profiles and can request an interview. Many programmers are screened by us and get the label ‘guaranteed’. Once the teams is selected, the team (all employees of a company) will work from our (or one of our partner’s) office. A process manager will be assigned to facilitate the communication between the team and the customer. We’ll manage and improve the team step by step (using a structured personal development process, team activities, training).
I saw the following diagram spread in social media several times in the past weeks. Although the changes go slow, organisation moves in this direction. One element I believe needs to be added to the picture is from ‘office’ to ‘anyplace’. This has a very big impact on the way work is organised. In the 20th century work was where you went. Now work is what you do. Work moves to the people instead of the other way around.
Few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on our company’s event. The visitors were both experienced offshorers and people planning to offshore their software development. One of the questions that arose was ‘what are the pitfalls in offshoring’. While I could write a book about this (and I actually did), I have a top three:
Are companies moving IT jobs back to their home country? Is offshoring on the reverse? I often hear people say that it’s the case. It often sounds like ‘hard facts’, so I decided to do a small research.
The first thing I found is that there is no research. There is hardly any research about the countries people offshore or nearshore to (at least from the Netherlands I couldn’t find any data). There is also no research about the net effect of jobs moving abroad versus jobs ‘coming back’. Maybe a wake up call to some researchers?
We recently launched our new eBook about offshoring and nearshoring :
‘How to Organize Offshore and Nearshore Collaboration’
The main questions came up when managing teams that are geographically distributed are:- How do you organize a remote collaboration? What process should you introduce? How do you communicate your requirements? How do you ensure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing? Nowadays, the technological infrastructure is in place and there are many companies working with globally distributed teams. At the same time, a lot of people look for a proven way to organize remote work. In this eBook, nine practitioners from different parts of the world and from different organizations share best practices based on their experiences.
The past few years, the ecommerce market is booming all over Europe. And consumers plan to shop online even more. Deutsche Post published a research last week, which shows that by 2025, ecommerce share on overall trade in developed countries, …
The past months, I have interviewed some 35 candidates for a marketing and sales role in our company. Because I want to save time, I always do the first screening through Skype. I believe this is a better medium than only phone, since you can see the candidate. So I have a list of questions that I go through in maximum 30 minutes to assure that there is at least a basis.
Agile retrospectives are a great way to continuously improve your way of working. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. An overview of things that you can use to get value out of your retrospectives.
Together with Luis Gonçalves I have written the pocket book on Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives which can be downloaded from InfoQ and Leanpub. This book is based on our blog posts on retrospectives (see Luis blogs on retrospectives and Ben’s blogs on retrospectives). We value your feedback, feel free to contact me and let me know what you think of this?
If you have a look at our facebook cover picture, you might already imagine it. Being a Global IT Staffing Company, this does not only mean that we do business on an international level. For us, operating in and between …
Do your teams want to know how agile they are? And what could be the possible next steps for them to become more agile and lean? In an open space session about Agile Self-Assessments organized by nlScrum we discussed why self-assessments matter and how teams can self-assess their agility to become better in what they do.
Two months back, I visited the lean startup conference in San Francisco. One of the talks that I loved was with Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress. He built wordpress step by step in the past years. Today, he has …
