One thing that I noticed early on two decades ago when I moved to US was almost all the time everyone was punctual except a few, coming from India with outsourcing and usage of communications tools at its infancy I was a bit amused. There are of course stragglers always everywhere but nothing like what it is in few other countries where I worked more so India. We often joke about IST – Indian Staggered time instead of Indian standard time. Not trying to generalize or paint with a broader brush, I am trying to get the importance punctuality deserves and what it does to our stature.

I have myself been at the receiving end at times being late for reasons beyond my control and felt embarrassed.

The trouble with being punctual,” so goes the saying, “is that there’s no one there to appreciate it.” The beauty of it though I now realize is the benefit of gathering your thoughts, preparing for your meeting, taking advantage of the calm and be composed, attend to possible distractions before the meeting begins etc just to name a few.

Yet if you have a meeting with your boss, your team, a client, or a job interview, you know they’ll appreciate it. Still, it’s easy to fall afoul of the tyranny of the clock: between our endlessly distracted minds and distraction-rich devices, we can fall into a pit clicks and–and soon need to scurry out the door.

Here are a few ways to address them.

1) Do a dry run to check out

Don’t assume your meeting place just minutes away, but is it really? it helps to do “walkthrough” to find out just how long it’ll take to get from your office to your meeting point if it is outside of your comfort zone be it restaurant, adjacent building or couple of blocks away. punctuality is a form of graciousness.

2) Always allow for buffer time

It’ll take a moment (or eight) to unplug from your task at hand–you’ll have chat windows to close, auto responders to set, bathrooms to use. So allow for some buffer time.

3) Preparation is the key

Okay, so you might be able to get your physical body to the place on time, but will you have the preparation? Similar to doing your due diligence before hopping on a phone call, any professional meeting requires homework: what does this person do? Why are you meeting? What are the outcomes you’re looking for? And if you haven’t met them before, what does this person even look like?

If we don’t get that prep done before the meeting, we could be walking down the sidewalk (or, worse, driving) while looking up their vital stats on our phones–an extremely unproductive form of procrastination. So let’s avoid that.

Once you get to venue wherever that is , follow the rules for excellent meetings.

4) Beware of things that kill you at the last minute

If you have 15 minutes before a meeting, don’t dissolve yourself into a super absorbing task, those are much better suited to your work in the cave. Instead, do “shallow” work, like answering a few email or catching up your news.

5) Don’t expect smooth going always – expect the unexpected

I dread the last minute emergency calls, bad Traffic, dependencies on others, Trains get late, buses fail. So if you’re planning around everything going right, you’re getting yourself late.

6) Avoid ” just one More thing to do”

We’re all obsessed with productivity–sometimes it gets a little weird. And sometimes it makes us late.

7) Being early is good

If being early feels like a waste of time, you may have jerk-like time tendencies. Instead, come prepared for the pause: bring a book or something to work on. Or just closely observe the world around you–since that’s the foundation of creativity

Technology made great progress with social media, cloud, new innovations etc leading the growth. A good measure of this is translating into more jobs into outsourcing hubs. Cloud for example will fuel rapid acceleration of using outsourcing hubs for housing data centers and resources that go with it. Social media still has a lot of steam to forge ahead.

Technology, like time, marches on. Amid all the retrospectives of the year gone by, it’s prudent to set our sights forward and prepare for the trends that will shape the channel in 2014. Last year was all about mobility, the maturation of Big Data, the emergence of gamification and the terror of advanced persistent threats.

While those technologies will continue to make their presence felt, for 2014 there’s a new set of tech trends on the radar. Here’s what is shaking up the channel in the year ahead.

BYOS makes a name for itself

BYOD, or bring-your-own-device, is so last year. The hot buzz-acronym for 2014 stands for bring-your-own-security. The BYOS trend is shaping up in response to the almost-daily revelations of U.S. government snooping in the cloud, coupled with the general uneasiness about security in cloud computing. Expect to see a host of new managements systems filling the desire of organizations to control their own data security and encryption rather than leaving the keys in the hands of the cloud hosts.

Cloud service providers take over IT

Despite what you may have read, there will be plenty of servers, networking components and storage gear sold next year. Unfortunately for the IT vendors, most of it will be acquired by thrift-seeking cloud service providers, forcing a shift in the major manufacturers’ mindset to a “cloud-first” world. According to IDC, about one third of all server shipments next year will go to cloud data centers, a number that’s due to rise to 43 percent by 2017.

Big Data attracts big money

A spate of cloud-based platforms capable of streaming Big Data in real time is set to push investments up somewhere around 30 percent to an all-time high of $14 billion in 2014, according to IDC. The ease of the cloud and a growing hunger for analysis of externally-sourced data and applications will fuel an exponential increase in the number of data brokers and a tripling in spending on specialized Big Data analytics services. The segments only moderating force will be a dearth of skilled and certified personnel to run it all.

3D printing takes shape

It’s been the ultimate nascent technology for going on two years now, but a few things are heating up the 3D printing market, most notably bioprinting, the amazing if controversial ability to produce functioning organs and tissues in something that looks like a tricked-out toaster over. It may take years to sort out the medical and ethical ramifications of bioprinting, but the buzz around it has the manufacturing industry taking a hard look at additive printing technology for rapid prototyping and bespoke modeling. Time to amp up your chops on print beds, powder rollers and extruders.

Biometrics gain ground on passwords

Solution providers should expect to answer a lot more questions about fingerprint readers, retina scanners, facial recognition software and other biometrics tools that are poised to disrupt the way all users gain access to their accounts and data. Let’s face it, the day of the text string as the ultimate IT safeguard are over. Most any password made up of string of characters can be broken in minutes. And managing the increasingly complex passwords needed for the growing number of devices and accounts in the modern user’s life is unsustainably onerous. Expect to see demand for advanced authentication techniques, first at large organization, and then filtering down to SMBs.

Smart machines join hands, take over the world

It’s hard to say which dry, unfortunate name is less appealing from a marketing perspective: machine-to-machine (M2M) technology or the Internet of Things. Neither inspires much awe, quite honestly. But even while bland monikers may have kept connected devices and machine-language analysis out of the mainstream consciousness, the capabilities this space is enabling are formidable. Expect to see new partnerships with IT vendors and service providers to address a market that’s predicted to climb north of $8.9 trillion over the next five years with somewhere between 15 billion and 30 billion connected things churning out data that will need to be captured, stored, processed and analyzed.

Smart stuff shows up everywhere

Embedded systems are getting a jumpstart from the same kinds of technologies that have made smartphones ubiquitous in modern life. Small, touch-enable gadgetry and tiny, robust sensors are finding their way into all manner of devices and are poised to disrupt the ways users manage their homes and office building, drive their cars and manage their transportation fleets, and connect with their families, friends and clients. Cheaper, smaller and faster embedded technology is so good today, that it’s finally making wearable computing a reality after years of false starts. By the end of 2014, Google Glass, Nike Fuel and Samsung’s GlaxayGear will be but a few of many devices designed to attach to the user and leverage the power of embedded technology.

It’s all about the apps

We all know it’s a mobile first world now. Will anyone be surprised when 70 percent of all information work done in the enterprise will be accomplished on a mobile device by the end of next year? But the heady rise in mobility has done more than simply put a premium on mobile device management. It has plowed up fertile ground for an app-based world, where almost every task will be accomplished through a specialized mobile application. The app market is expected to reach $38 billion in two years, in part because of the growing need for proprietary applications to support business functions.

Social gets useful

Nobody hates cat videos and brunch pics more than us. The promise of social media to fuel the social enterprise has been mired in a lot of wasteful activity and negligible results for several years. But 2014 promises to be social technology’s breakout year for business, with social sharing aspects finding their way under the hood of a number of enterprise applications as well as establishing itself firmly as a strategic part of most all customer engagement and marketing efforts. It’s just smart business. Over the next three years, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have an active customer community, up from 30% today, according to IDC. And where is all that social information going? Right back into the enterprise’s product and service development efforts. Social technology deserves props in 2014

DOs :
Introduce yourself by your full name and title. Informality is not respected.
Welcome any invitation to engage in social interaction outside of work.
Learn to pronounce names correctly – even if it means a lot of practice.

DONTs:
Do not complain about or put down your organization or your home country.
If you are not proud of them, why should they be doing business with you?
Do not try to be humble by omitting earned degrees or titles. They are highly respected and carry a great deal of weight.

The beauty of outsourcing is getting the skills you want temporarily so you are not saddled with those skill set that you don’t need permanently. This has helped save on precious IT budgets.

Not infrequently, you will need those skill sets that even your vendor cannot find right away. You will come across an outsourced vendor selling you skills that don’t match with your requirements. This happens more so in cases where the position has been open for quite sometime or where skill sets are not available with the vendor forcing him to resort to give alternatives. Most often they come with some kind of assurance that this will work or at times padded up so show some experience.

Example if you ask for a Adobe CQ a vendor could offer flex resources saying that they can pick it up easily and not to be concerned. similarly for .NET trained resources you could get Java instead saying they will pick it up in few weeks. Who is paying for this training – consider that, also how this is going to impact your efficiency and deadlines.

Some common technologies are fairly available in the market so there is no need to compromise on taking those that are not closer to it. Rarely you will find skill sets that are impossible to find given that most of the resources from outsourced vendors are in the average age group of 25 to 30 years and some of the skills are much older than that.

Assess the opportunity costs while making decisions. Not just money is at stake here, there are deadlines and quality issues to be looked into as well.

In large outsourcing arrangements when you change the underlying technology on a large-scale there is reason to persist with those that can adapt if they have significant business knowledge and have a fair compromise to leverage their SME skills and less of technical skills while they pick up. Also the technology has to be similar not entirely different to bridge and be able to adapt quickly. Also some level of training paid for the vendor is extremely helpful as well. Verify what kind of training is being offered, the depth and length of the training and how that would be helpful to the job on hand.

The other day I was attending large PMI symposium with hundreds of career project managers in Tampa Florida. During one of the routine lunch breaks which is open of networking I happened to be seated next to a gentleman that worked for a large accounting firm that ramped its outsourcing over last two years to an India based firm, he was critical of the whole outsourcing. He kept on complaining how nothing is working, the challenges he faced in his job and how this will eventually collapse and painted a picture of gloom and doom and went on ranting for the next 45 minutes. I did listen patiently, finished my lunch and wished him good luck, patience and told him to seek early retirement since he mentioned it was on his mind.

First things first, I am not saying that outsourcing is not without flaws or pitfalls. But look at the benefits as a CIO or CEO would look at it, you cannot ignore the ROI not just from economic sense, but for the ability to source what you want, when you want at a competitive price. Being a technology leader myself I have been situations when I sent assignments to my offshore team and next morning it was ready to be presented to the clients often to their surprise, they would ask me if I lost sleep trying to complete their assignment, and when I tell them that I went to sleep after sending it offshore over a brief call with instructions in the email and they sent it this morning, their jaws dropped. Imagine being 24/7, support or working round the clock from three locations – you can delight your clients for sure while cutting costs.

Every outsourcing arrangements has pitfalls, you just have to have the right leadership, experience and the patience to solve hurdles as you come across. Don’t imitate outsourcing just because others are doing it. The one size fits all wont work. Every business is different, and every outsourcing partner is different in some sense, e.g. some specialize in banking, Insurance, while others specialize in healthcare, engineering etc. there are specialized firms today in everything you do from VLSI to space technologies, Aviation, retain, telecom, Geo mapping so on and so forth.

I covered previously in my blog what to watch for as you go about making outsourcing arrangements. It would make perfect sense not just economic sense to outsource and in some case a case for survival of the company more so during recession. A Sustained campaign to train your staff on embracing outsourcing is the key. There are many firms today that specialize in sensitizing your staff on managing across boundaries. Explain the benefits and the situational need to outsource and providing scientific evidence on dealing with different culture and developing appreciation for it are some ways to keep the resistance low. Seeing colleagues lose jobs as outsourcing ramps up in most companies is not a great scenario for motivation and morale. This was not the culture that we all grew up with. I have worked in companies where three generations worked under the same roof and was common if not rare. It does breed a culture of some employees resorting to bickering and bad mouthing the company like my friend did to me at the lunch. The workplace is changing and rapidly at that for some of us to adapt and retool.

Outsourcing is here to stay, you can wish it goes away with insourcing but no, I dont see that even on the distant horizon.

Most Outsourcing arrangements are often multiple vendor set up for very obvious reasons – allow them to compete on all fronts and gain pricing advantage. However there are cases where single vendor is an approach, this happens more from the vendor side that often tend to negotiate to be sole provider for a discounted price. The clients falls for it not knowing how this will impact in the long run. This is not an uncommon practice starting in early 70s, then 80 when large corporations in developed economies mostly in US and Europe outsourced their IT departments to concentrate on their core business.

It works well initially till the outsourced vendor entrenches itself, gains the confidence and then begins the downwards spiral. At times it has been quick within five to ten years, and some that slightly lasted more than that. In every relationship the initial years though it begins with struggle, you get the best top to bottom and once the investment phase is over the outsourced vendor starts looking at their bottom lines to see how they can squeeze more out of the deal. Hobnobbing for couple of years it is easy to get cozy at all levels and see the service levels drop unless there is a good way to measure and improve on the performance benchmarks. The initial bar set low should be gradually scaled so the contractual performance improves not stagnates.

The influence of senior management on single vendor situations are not uncommon. The appreciation and understanding at that top-level is not commensurate with what is happening at the ground. The need to support single vendor solution keeping in view the economies it provides to the clients bottom line tops all judgment. The message always to the lower cadres is to fall in line and keep the relationship going at all costs. It is only when the worst nightmares surface that management take notice and take remedial action, by that time the damage is done. Stories about of clients that lost all of its competitiveness, time to market, lost a ton of money, their brain power before they decided enough is enough and threw the vendor out and move on to other strategies from finding a new partner or totally bringing everything in house. It takes years depending on the size of the contract to get back in shape.

Single vendor relationships tend to look like a financial boon initially given the pricing advantage, however it tapers off very quick. It is always good to have atleast two if not more vendors compete for your outsourcing dollars. Every benchmark you care comes into play and competition plays it out driving the advantages and improving overall efficiencies

I am sure many of you that are involved in outsourcing have been part of the billing war in some form or fashion. Guess who wins every time, it is the outsourced provider. Most of the time the clients just give up or think they have bigger fish to fry so they move on. Like drops of water make an ocean, this adds up.

Most of the IT outsourcing contracts are geared towards ensuring providers have some leeway into protection of their billing. The era of fixed price bids is not a norm anymore solely due to the fact that it doesn’t work well for the providers, many have lost face and money in these type of deals which is again due to a host of factors that I will cover another time. The other billing types lime T&M, Staff augmentation, sole contracts etc. are fodder for billing leakages.

it is advisable to have a robust process to check billing and make sure the outsourcing dollars are spent wisely. Processing of invoices as they come in needs discipline and verification against time sheet data. The source being time sheets, it pays to have people signing off those to do their due diligence. At times there is no connection between those that approve time sheets and those that process invoices which is best avoided. You want both of these folks to be in sync to do what it takes to be accurate in processing bills.

Given the downturn almost all IT outsourced providers have tightened the belt on what they call “Billing Leakage”. Not just that they actively look for measures to see where they can tap out more billing often going for smaller lines. it helps since the clients really don’t look at smaller lines with that close eye it deserves.

Many providers have lost face or lost credibility due to this factor, at time the middle manager at these firms tend to be aggressive to exceed their targets with unscrupulous means. Most of the senior leadership at the providers are not about these smaller moneys coming at the cost of credibility and actually discourage such practices. It is not uncommon to have broken process that benefits providers, they simply refuse to make improvements for obvious reasons

Given the economic situation and the need to account for every dollar spent on outsourcing it is imperative to relook at the billing practices and processing workflow end to end from receipt of the bills to payments and take remedial action. Many firms will benefit from doing a wing to wing mapping using Lean Sigma. There is lot of money to be made here for clients in terms of savings and arrest the billing leakage from their ends.