In my other articles, I have provided insights into the steps to get your remote organizations started and finding the correct model. However, if you are a Small and Medium-sized business and already have a remote team, chances are you did miss one of the steps when going through the initial setup and are currently figuring out why your global organization is not working. You are not alone. According to research, 50% of the organizations that start global IT sourcing do not get the benefits they expected. Research also indicates that most of these organizations will continue down the same path, making minor modifications and hoping it will work and losing time and money in experimentation. In this article, we will focus on the key reason why your global model is not working. The article assumes that you have the right offshore model in place and the issue is with running the operations.
The Team
If your global process is not delivering the value you expected, chances are you don’t have the right team in place.
A key aspect of an effective remote team is a strong local leadership that is willing, enabled and experienced in taking ownership of the processes they have been assigned. Even when working in the offshore delivery model, investing in a strong leadership is key to be successful. You’d also need the right resources onsite that are committed to making the model successful. A change to the teams, either onsite or remote or both should fix these issues.
Offshored processes
A defined offshoring roadmap helps a great deal in a smooth transition to offshore. A knowledge of the resource skills at the offshoring location and the key processes and impacts of these processes are key inputs in defining this roadmap. Before determining what processes would be outsourced, maintain a mapping of the processes & impacts along with the offshore skillset required. Another reason why your offshore model is not providing the desired results could be the processes that have been offshored. This is an expensive process to start from scratch. However, a critical analysis at the offshored processes and defining a roadmap would ensure not aggravating the situation and smoothing out the operations.
Governance
The absence of governance mechanisms along with key performance indicators leaves the offshore success to be relative. Organizations should have analyzed their success criteria and have a governance and metrics in place to measure the success of the offshoring processes.
Process documentation and changes
For offshoring to be successful, it typically requires organizations to adopt new processes aligned with the changes. It is important to communicate via documentation the processes that both the offshore and onsite resources are expected to follow. This needs to be followed up with milestones to evaluate how the metrics are
Picking the wrong model
If you have the wrong model, it would require a detailed analysis of what the right model is and a transition roadmap to the correct model. This is a topic in itself that I’ll cover subsequently
What process should be outsourced. See Article specifying the first steps to offshoring
Evaluating the Opportunity – including risks
Picking the wrong model – see article on offshoring models
Covalnz Advisory services is a consulting firm that works for Small and Medium businesses to help find the right IT partners to source globally.
