The demand for offshoring is a keeper despite of the increasing costs (labour) in the supplier region. In our conversations with the product managers (manufacturing) and IT managers revealed that they are still planning and looking at the opportunities for offshore outsourcing. The collapsing economy forces the companies to pay more attention to required capabilities for a successful offshoring strategy … Continue reading
In my previous article I described some lessons learned on failures that I made in building my Global IT Staffing company Bridge. I have few more important lessons that are more on the entrepreneurial side than on the offshore management side but I believe they are helpful in building any international cooperation. The failure I described in my last month’s … Continue reading
A few weeks back I wrote an article about What makes global teamwork, offshoring, nearshoring and remote cooperations so interesting. I have a critical father in law who told me that I described some pitfalls that I walked into and asked me ‘but what did you learn from the mistakes you made?’ So I devote this article to that question, because … Continue reading
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 country’s cultural perspective as well as a company culture. To illustrate the point, I will share an example. In one … Continue reading
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 sprint planning well. The typical situation in smaller teams (especially for companies that recently started with offshoring, they typically start … Continue reading
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 “Outsource This”. There are so many advantages of hiring an outsourced employee, some of these advantages are:
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 I was working in a publishing company in Amsterdam. They published city maps, sponsored by advertisers from each city. The … Continue reading
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 that there are so many cases where people get a negative experience. But at the same time, the size of the … Continue reading
