Key Drivers

Entering into an offshore engagement with a third party supplier presents a number of challenges to those employees of your organization, who are responsible for the day-to-day management of the offshoring initiatives. A large number of project leaders and team leaders will be required to radically change their management styles overnight in order to manage virtual teams. If they are not trained well or not adequately supported to manage this transformation, they will have an expensive learning curve during the transformation of their local project team into a virtual team.

The Solution

By executing a large number of offshore engagements, Initto offshore consultants have learned managing offshore projects the “hard way.” This first-hand experience enables our consultants to act as coaches to an organization's project leaders and team leaders to help reduce the learning curve associated with offshore projects. Initto consultants' approach is one of “ operational project management,” which means that they get their hands dirty along with project leaders and team leaders in mitigating the day-to-day challenges that may be encountered when managing virtual teams.

Client Role and Responsibility

In order to ensure that offshore projects have the necessary buy-in and commitment within the organization, it is recommended that clients provide their project leaders and team leaders with a sparring partner to help them resolve day-to-day operational issues that arise out of the typical challenges introduced due to cultural, communication, coordination, and process changes. If these challenges are not addressed at an early stage, the result may be unacceptable quality, poor productivity, or even employees suffering stress. These negative factors present obstacles to achieving the goals of offshore development.

Initto Advantage

Initto consultants have the experience to act as coaches and sparring partners to your organization’s critical resources and will help them:

• Develop a set of skills during the transformation process to overcome cultural, language, communication, and coordination barriers to build a “virtual team” across borders.
• Develop an effective mode of operation within the virtual team. This mode of operation is based on clear expectation, clear goals, clear roles and responsibilities, and on being proactive instead of reactive
• Establish clear quality goals so that quality issues are captured as early in the development cycle as possible.
• Establish and identify steps to improve the productivity of the team by monitoring people, processes and performance.
• Step into troubled outsource projects and assist the key stakeholders to bring them back on track.