Category Archives: Uncategorized

Managing cultural sensitivity in outsourced environment

Todays IT sourcing is truly global crossing several boundaries.

Pay close attention to culture and adapt yourself quickly. With increased outsourcing percentages across several industries, it is pertinent to know about the culture on the other side. Bringing in experts to talk to teams and sensitize the broader segment of the team that interfaces regularly with offshore resources is a good idea. Almost all of the outsourcing companies more so the bigger India pure play firms have their own experts who routine put resources thru this grind. The higher your levels greater the emphasis and training on cultural sensitivities.

India based call centers for examples are makign thier resouces know more about baseball, basketball, hockey, football, rugby to know the teams and its more high-profile team members. They are encouraged to talk about them besides of course daily dose of weather which everyone loves to relate. Dos and don’ts are common practice and circulated widely. Special training is provided to those that are getting ready to fly into a client location.

There is no doubt both sides pay great attention and take pride in their culture and hence the need to ensure appropriate respect and attention is paid. If there are questions it is best addressed with those in the know. There is no dearth of resources to reach out to or tp into ever popular internet and Google it outright.

More often it is easy to adapt with some adjustment and accommodation. This is connected to the moral and motivation of team as well. There are lots of examples that I can share ranging from respecting the dressing sense, etiquette, eating habits, punctuality, efficiency, timeliness, discipline, language, festivals and holidays, behavior just to name a few.

Dont stay out, stay in and benefit – afterall you will learn something new in todays global environment.

Provisioning HW and SW for your offshore resources

This is a delicate issue and complicated one at that. With more and more core support moving out offshore there is always a need for vendor to ask for hardware and software from the clients abroad. However there are financial, legal and security issues involved. While the implementation of security protocols in India pure-play firms is very strict, you can install any software with an approval from clients. Some software provides for installs globally via master services agreement, whhile most of the software licenses do not extend beyond the shores of the country where it was legally purchased.

The challenges is with controlling the inventory as well, there are cases where the offshore vendors install hundreds of copies of software without the knowledge and implication on what this means, very few clients have good process in place to monitor SW and HW.

With HW it is even more delicate since the vendor would not support clients HW in some cases – mostly laptops. fixing routine problems, upgrades are a problem. In some cases, the clients end up asking the vendor to buy on their behalf and it ends up as “client funded, vendor owned” the ability to capitalize the purchases is lost in most cases leave alone benefit from pricing advantages if brought onsite.

Some clients treat their offshore centers as extension of their work place. however the vendor site not necessarily would fall under that category even with a MSA. (Master Services Agreement). Even the clients offices offshore will not be covered where the SW or HW is purchased in countries where the license agreements specifically call for using within the shores of the country where brought.

The fact that provisioning is needed for execution and support makes this a necessary evil. However putting together a good tracking mechanism will save clients from legal exposure, and also benefit from this measure than losing precious funds that can be put to use elsewhere. Also this cost is additional to overall outsourcing budget is important since this could end up being a significant amount.

Handling cultural sensitivities in IT outsourced environment

Pay close attention to culture and adapt yourself quickly. With increased outsourcing percentages across several industries, it is pertinent to know about the culture on the other side. Bringing in experts to talk to teams and sensitize the broader segment of the team that interfaces regularly with offshore resources is a good idea. Almost all of the outsourcing companies, more so the bigger India pure play firms have their own experts who routine put resources thru this grind. The higher your levels greater the emphasis and training on cultural sensitivities. This is part of training curriculam and performance appraisals.

India based call centers for examples have thrust forced watching of baseball, basketball, hockey, football, rugby to know the teams and its more high profile team members. They are encourage to talk about them besides ofcourse daily dose of weather which everyone loves to relate. Dos and don’ts are common practice and circulated widely. Special training is provided to those that are getting ready to fly into a client location.

There is no doubt both sides pay great attention and take pride in their culture and hence the need to ensure appropriate respect and attention is paid. If there are questions it is best addressed with those in the know. There is no dearth of resources to reach out to or using the ever popular internet to Google it outright.

More often it is easy to adapt with some adjustment and accommodation. This is connected to the moral and motivation of team as well. There are lots of examples that I can share ranging from respecting the dressing sense, etiquette, eating habits, punctuality, pronounciation, efficiency, timeliness, discipline, language, behavior just to name a few.

Getting the best out of consultants in IT Outsourced environment

This topic has been every on every employer’s mind in a IT outsourced environment, How do I get the best of the consultant pool? Span of control, better supervision over the pool, embedding employer representatives on the floor offshore, reporting weekly, monthly etc., fixing accountability and responsibility on deliverables with timelines, routine audits, and check points are some of the techniques.

Not all of these techniques work, what you put in place depends on nature of work and also the maturity of the consultant pool. The junior the pool, the more techniques need to be applied and less as the pool is mature and senior enough, Experience onsite as well helps understand the dynamics and expectations besides knowing the culture of the organization.

Having a good framework of checks and balances avoids surprises, removes inefficiencies to a good extent, assures predictability, and improves morale and motivation on both ends. The biggest frustration of employers that have consultants on their projects is the ability to control output a.k.a productivity. The dream of consultants being on par with their rank and file employees in terms of skillsets and efficiency is out of questions. In some cases a consultant is better than employer if these skills are niche and are needed temporarily. Having a toolbox of techniques to gain efficiencies in an outsourced environment is the key.

Remember consultant’s loyalty is always with the employer and not necessarily with the principal that employs him. Also note all of his personal evaluation is done by the employer based on their standards with little input at times on how the consultant is faring. The consultants are more interested in making sure they are toeing their employer’s line. Very few mature organizations have brought together both to reap the rewards.

Sharing best practices across the board, what is working and what is not in a particular setting is important so everyone with the organization gets benefit from a outsourced engagement and evolve a culture of benefiting from outsourced environment then seeing it as a burden.

Definition of Outsourcing

Outsourcing is the contracting out of an internal business process to a third party organization. The practice of contracting a business process out to a third party rather than staffing it internally is common in the modern economy. The term “outsourcing” became popular in the United States near the turn of the 21st century. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another but not always.

The definition of outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic contracting, and sometimes includes offshoring, which means relocating a business function to another country. Financial savings from lower international labor rates is a big motivation for outsourcing/offshoring.

The opposite of outsourcing is called insourcing, which entails bringing processes handled by third party firms in-house, and is sometimes accomplished via vertical integration. However, a business can provide a contract service to another business without necessarily insourcing that business process

source : Wikipedia

Estimations in IT Outsourced environment

Estimation is one of the hidden costs that eats into your outsourcing costs. More often poor hands offs of scope and requirements result in piquant situation like these. The classic case of missing out on key documentation, missing links in handoffs, lack of attention to details and then the blame game begins. It is extremely important to ensure adequate checks and balances be it via simple team communications using collaborations tools, IM, chat, few phone calls along the way as you progress on estimations thru deliverables be it small, large or medium size projects or just plain simple deliverables.

Be it managed services proposal, time and material, project or program the chances that your estimation is (+) or (-) 5% is almost ruled out. This impacts both sides depending on who went wrong with their strategy.

Check when was the last time you had a project execution right on target 10 (+) or (-). A greater majority of the projects you will see go off the tangent. Precisely due to the above factors. At times the culture of padding every step which exponentially increases the estimates is common. The idea is with so much padding you are going to be successful which is not often the case. Not going into details or following a scientific process to estimate is a risk. Not very project needs to go into a functional point estimation which could be overkill, use plain best practice methods to understand work packets, break down to component level or any lower level that wont fluctuate your estimations Create your own template if you don’t have one and be consistent, run it by a peer, get reviews done and plug in feedback.

Predictable outcomes always comes from good estimations, not to mention quality of the deliverable. Poor estimations run of risk of cutting corners to achieve the end goal.
Writing good estimation needs to be developed as a culture and getting to a point of having offshore teams deliver better estimations is a discipline that will pay huge dividends. It saves time, money and frustrations, helps improve team spirit and motivate teams to do better via customer satisfaction.