A close look at a set of offshore IT management tools you cannot do without
A few years ago, IT managers of companies in the West would have asked questions like: “Should we send work offshore? What are the benefits of offshore outsourcing?” Today those questions are passé. Instead, they are asking: “How can we manage our offshore outsourcing operations better? How can we maximize our gains? Which of our applications are best suited for offshore outsourcing? How can we get more control over and transparency into the offshore process?”
Over the years, the offshore landscape has matured considerably. Thousands of companies have reaped powerful benefits from offshore operations, including lower costs, more efficient processes, better quality, and strategic gains such as improved focus on core competency, customer service and business development.
Of course, not all enterprises that have gone offshore have met with success. Their failure must not be misunderstood as a failure of the offshore model. Different companies have failed for different reasons.
Some were simply not ready for outsourcing. Offshore outsourcing brings about a sea-change within the customer organization. It calls for managers to assume new roles and responsibilities, it calls for the ability to adjust to new processes and new work cultures, and it calls for a different set of skills to manage remote teams. If an organization isn’t ready, offshore engagements can get quite sticky.
Some companies sent applications offshore that were not particularly suited for remote development and maintenance. There are many factors that influence whether an application is suitable for outsourcing or not. These include: complexity of application or domain, availability of documentation, size of the project, application criticality, age of application, life stage of application, user interaction, etc. If your applications are not chosen carefully after a thorough analysis of your portfolio, it is unlikely that you will realize the rewards of offshore outsourcing.
One of the biggest problems customer organizations face is a lack of control over and visibility into vendor operations. Project teams are usually thousands of miles away, mostly in asynchronous time zones, and belong to different cultures. Often, they have no efficient way of communicating with project teams and monitoring progress of work on a regular basis. Are the resources deployed for our project being used efficiently? Are they productive enough? Are they doing quality work? Are deadlines being met? Who do I escalate this problem to? These are concerns that are common to managers in charge of offshore projects. Thirty-five percent of respondents in the Deloitte Consulting Outsourcing Study, October-December 2004, said loss of control was one of the risks of outsourcing.
Fortunately none of these problems are insurmountable. Mastek has leveraged its over two decades of experience in successfully managing complex, large-scale, mission-critical projects offshore to build a set of tools that ensure that its customers outsource the right applications at the right time, and have full control and transparency throughout the offshore lifecycle.