If you have recently wondered if offshoring could work for you or if you have even already started offshoring some of your works, you may have asked yourself ‘what should I do to prepare’? Or you might have acted like most people do: you just started (or you plan to do so)?
From my experience, I believe the most crucial thing you can do to make offshoring work is: prepare well. To first think before acting (with acting I mean start a project or start doing the actual work offshore). It lies in the human nature and especially the entrepreneurs or managers nature to just ‘get going’, because you want to see results. I believe in a lot of business areas this may be the proper thing to do, but with a complex organizational form (which offshoring is), it is a road with a lot of hurdles.
In my company, Bridge Outsourcing, we have summarized 5 key success factors in offshoring:
1. People; 2. Process; 3. Preparation; 4. Profit; 5. Performance
Without previous experience in offshoring, it might be a troublesome job to understand what you have to do to prepare, so I will try to highlight the most important areas in this article.
It all starts with the big question ‘will I set up my own office or will I engage a supplier‘? To decide on this, I believe you need to do 3 things: A. Build a business case and compare which option is most profitable (I have a spreadsheet which I can share with you, just drop me an email: h.messer@bridge-outsourcing.nl); B. Question yourself: Am I ready to learn the hard way, make a lot of errors and spend more money than my most positive business case has accounted for?; C. If you choose a supplier: ensure that you have a good ‘feeling’ (visit their office, talk to them and don’t look at pricing and facts only)
Once you’ve decided on the model, there are 2 key areas to focus on during the ‘real’ preparation: People and Process.
People
In the people area, some points of attention:
- Invest time in meeting the key people on your vendor’s side (in the build it yourself version, you’d have to find those key people first, your first expensive hurdle)
- Set up a clear selection process together with your partner to ensure you get the right people for the right job (You have a selection procedure in your own company, right?). If the steps here are clear, there can be no misunderstanding from both sides and you are sure to get that top team.
- Prepare your existing team. In general, people don’t embrace offshoring untill they see what it can bring them. Your existing people have to get used to the change and they need to get the big picture.
- Once you have your team selected, start bonding. You could visit the offshore office or you could invite them to your office (the more expensive option, but highly recommended for team motivation).
Process
In the process area, some points of attention:
- The most important and most forgotten: start developing a documented process description right before the start of the actual work. Before ‘doing the work’, a solid foundation has to be created by thinking about the ‘how we work’ .
- The ideal situation is to start from your own internal processes. If you don’t have them written down (and for offshoring you need them written down!), start writing down your internal processes first. By doing that, you stimulate thinking about ‘how we work’ and the thinking itself will make the transition offshore easier.
- Write down everything that needs ‘alignment’. Examples. If you use an online project management tool (and you have to!), make a guide on how to use that system. If you use Scrum, document what time exactly the daily meetings will be held, who will be attending, how you’ll do it, what questions will be asked. Write down how specifications are to be made, who’s repsonsible for what part.
At Bridge, we have developed a workshop in which all the aspects that need to be prepared are discussed (there are many more, these were just a few examples). If you have any questions or suggestions on the preparation to offshoring, I would love to hear your comments. If you want to know more about our workshop, feel free to contact me.
I think this is very important. Thanks a lot.