Acism's Offshore Outsourcing Guide > Challenges

It's not that outsourcing projects always succeed. Quite a few offshored projects have failed. Through the successes and failures, some patterns have emerged.

The two key challenges are:

• Communication Effort : Communication needs are always non-trivial when everyone is not working from the same location. Even companies having more than one offices in the same country experience it. A judicious use of communication mechanisms becomes mandatory. It's a must to have clear and concise communication. It takes special effort from both sides to do that.
• Timezone Differences : India's time zone is GMT +5:30, which roughly means that Indians start their day 4-5 hours earlier than the Europeans or 10-13 hours earlier than the Americans. If your Indian team gets stuck while you are asleep, then there is a danger of losing some precious time on the project. This again draws importance to the project planning and communication angles.

Of course, there are standard ways to tackle these challenges. However, we need to acknowledge their existence first. Disregarding these challenges is the most fatal mistake a project can do.

Outsourcing exercise can fail or can become quite painful for some of the reasons given below. There are ways to tackle most of them; however it's a good idea to address them upfront to avoid failures.

• You are a control freak and are not willing to give away some control. You need to have a basic trust in the outsourcing partner that they would know some things better than you in their context. Micromanaging will work against team moral and the overall efficiency of the project.
• You are not ready to invest effort in letting the offshore team understand the requirements. At times you may have to let them know the context around the requirements for those to make sense. Things work differently in different countries and not having the right context or worse – having a wrong context can easily kill the project.
• You have very tight deadline for tomorrow morning... unless you are absolutely certain that the offshore team cannot get stuck when you are sleeping. Work with your offshore partner to reduce this risk. It's possible to meet deadlines if you do that.
• You are not able to provide timely feedback. There is no communication in the world that is faultless. The offshore team needs your feedback on time – the earlier the better.
• You are not working with the right offshore partner. All offshore companies are not alike. Not all are ethical and there is a good opportunity to cheat. Further, not all offshore companies understand what they need to do from their side to make the project a success. Make sure that you are working with an offshore partner whom you can be comfortable with and whom you can trust. Take your time to develop the trust. Being bed partners on the very first date is usually not a good idea!