Managing Offshore IT

It is that time of the year when many of us reflect on ‘the year that was’ and make resolutions for the year to come.

The year for me began with wrapping up definition of a technology strategy for an affiliate style portal to be architected for an insurance client. An offshore Architect assigned to work with me did a wonderful job researching some of the key aspects the emerging trends in portal definition technologies. The client also decided to break down the construct phase along modular lines and sourced the work to Infosys and another vendor. The project then moved on to the construct phase and my colleagues from a delivery unit took charge.

During the first quarter, I spent a couple of months traveling to a client, a large media conglomerate where our team was facing a unique challenge. This was a firefighting engagement, not unique to many offshoring scenarios. The client had signed a multi-year (multi-million dollar) sourcing contract with Infosys primarily to help support a portfolio of applications. Subsequently, there was a shift in the client’s strategy driven by a leadership change: the new IT Director who took over the portfolio realized that root cause of problems were due to the archaic technologies on the ground. He got a buy-in for a rewrite of his portfolio, preferring to push for an agile development strategy. The team on the ground was struggling to come to grips with the change in client’s strategy and was considering throwing the book at them to buy time; telling them ‘it was not in the contract!’

I realized that it was my responsibility to help both sides bridge the communication divide. Though the client leaders were asking for a shift to agile development, and shift from a maintenance to a development mode, what they really wanted was a clear roadmap where the initiatives could be ‘projectized.’ And this is exactly what the offshore team was asking too: how can we get our hands around the big picture, understand the goals and start delivering on the quick-wins.

It has been over seven months since my engagement and last I checked, the offshore team, supported by a few onsite coordinators have successfully shifted gears and are continuing to deliver on the client’s vision.

Towards the latter half of the year, I got engaged with a client financial services provider, helping their management with their technology architecture and planning exercise. This was just one aspect of the engagement as I was also working closely with the Infosys team that was putting together a proposal for the client’s sourcing contract. It was interesting to observe first-hand the dynamics of a large deal process including the various stages of vetting, negotiation, offshore visits…. The whole nine-yards. Before the year ended, news came that we had won the bid and the client signed a multi-year 80-million-dollar-plus offshore-onsite contract with Infosys.

In November, it was great to take a two-week sabbatical from my day-job to travel to Texas to attend a two-week long Infosys Certified CTO “Enterprise Architect” workshop where I had an opportunity to interact, ideate, brainstorm with colleagues and academics.

Along the way, of course there was the usual grind of offshore calls during ‘odd hours,’ working on pre-sales, and proposals, traveling for presentations and client meetings, coming to grips with some internal organizational changes; and moonlighting on my writing, articles, whitepapers and this blog.

Was there anything I wish I could change from the past year? Absolutely nothing at my end!

ps: And if you think my journey was the least bit interesting, you should perhaps hear from some of my other colleagues.

Season's Greetings to you and your family....With a hope that past experience reflect into better future … HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A few days ago, an Infosys onsite manager, Sam, pinged me asking if I could meet with him for lunch as he was looking for some mentoring. He was using the slow time between Christmas and New Year to reflect on the ‘year that was’ and plan for the New Year’s resolution. I agreed and during lunch he described how he was confounded by the new expectations from his Engagement Manager who was expecting Sam to pick up on some of the ‘account’ related administrative activities with a clear message: Sam had to look for opportunities to ‘contribute’ to the account team if he wanted to grow in the organization.

Sam’s dilemma was clear: he was billable a full time in the client’s project where he was expected to contribute and manage the project Infosys was executing. And here was his Infosys EM expecting him to step up and take on additional responsibilities related to the account.

In case you are wondering about the typical additional responsibilities, there is no list, but the activities could include:

• Supporting the billing activities. Service firms send invoices to clients for work done during a period, depending on the nature of the project. The managers closest to the ground at the client location perhaps have the best knowledge of the project/s and hence are in the best position to validate the data feeding into invoices
• Ensuring Renewal of SoW, Work orders etc. Many contracts between clients and service firms are open ended where the scope of the work continues to emerge. This means that both parties revisit work orders, SoWs etc periodically. Again, managers on the ground have the best inputs to the process of extensions etc.
• Support in pre-sales, proposals etc. Managers on the ground, with the best context of the client’s exact requirements and needs are well positioned to provide inputs to their service firm’s team putting the proposal together.  
• Knowledge management: This includes defining and publishing case studies based on learnings from a project. This works both ways since clients also expect Infosys and other service firms to draw on their prior knowledge. In the context, it is the manager’s responsibility to ensure that the client specific information is de-referenced before it enters the service firm’s ecosystem.
• External brand management. This is a vast area and could include participating in technical forums, writing whitepapers, contributing to the industry body (outside the firm’s ecosystem). An example of this would be this blog that you are reading.
• Mentoring more junior folks (in an offshoring context, this includes orienting those traveling onsite for the first time)
• Other Activities... Example could be taking on responsibility for other onsite activities, say coordinating a Christmas party for the team.

I observed that Sam’s predicament was not unique to an offshoring firm but is probably true of predicament of most consulting and service firms: how much to contribute back to the firm?  

My input to Sam was simple. I described how the emerging expectations were not unique to our company alone. In my past life with another (non Offshoring) service firm, I too had been faced with this dilemma: I realized that as a representative of my firm, I had two sets of stakeholders. I was a key member of the client’s project team. However the ‘client’ was not responsible for my career development, training, learning or other professional development needs; my consulting firm was. I had only one way to grow beyond my area of responsibility: look for opportunities to contribute to my firm.

Should the expectation from Sam's manager be any different?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

For those interested in contributing to research, here is an interesting invitation to participate in "Duke's 4th annual Offshoring Research Survey" Note from Jeff Russell, Managing Director of Offshoring Research Network:

We are requesting your assistance to help us to increase the number of participants in the 4th annual Offshoring Research Network (ORN) client-side survey co-sponsored by the Conference Board. There are currently 789 companies in the panel study and we would like to increase participation in 2007! Participants should be familiar with strategy for either a business unit or company wide and if currently offshoring, details of specific projects. The survey also collects data on companies that are considering or have decided not to offshore these activities. The survey will close January 15th.

To take the survey, register at the following link using the key “duke” and log in to the Offshoring Research Network (KEY: duke)

The survey can generally be completed in 15-20 minutes. As a benefit of participation, you will:

* Receive the complete analyses of survey results broken down by function (ITO, BPO, etc.), industry and country (U.S./Germany/U.K., etc.)
* Receive an invitation to attend the January debriefing at Duke to network, share lessons/best practices, and discuss future directions for research
* Share ideas in a secure offshoring forum
* Receive personalized benchmarking report (not yet available)
* Access to Duke researched case studies

ORN has been collecting firm level data for four years specific to such functional areas such as IT, Customer Service, Business Processes, Engineering, R&D, and Product Design in lower cost countries. Last year the survey was extended to the European Union with five partner universities. The research focuses on key performance metrics, sources of value, risks, future plans, etc.

Further details on Offshoring Research Network homepage and Research FAQ

Personal note: I am not a member of ORN, though I may participate in the research/survey

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Many of us in the business of technology are passionate or at least curious about the current happenings; and Web 2.0, convergence and collaborative technologies are certainly up on the list. I had begun my musing by blogging on the topic a few weeks ago, and had an interesting conversation with a gentleman, Bob, I bumped into at a Christmas dinner a few days ago. He is a Project Manager working for a local manufacturing firm, who also moonlights as a Deal consultant. Before I could keep a mental note to look up what Deal consultants did, Bob ventured to explain how he was involved as a go-between, introducing two parties for a ‘small’ cut (1-2 %), casually adding that the deals he brokered were typically in the multi-million dollar range, if not upwards. And as a deal-consultant he did not get involved in the nitty-gritty of negotiations, proposals or other aspects of the life cycle. His expertise lay in leveraging his contacts built over a period of time and ensuring that the right parties met at opportune times.

Bob primarily dealt with hi-tech service firms and clients, and was pretty updated on technologies himself, so I asked him if he saw a threat to his ilk from Web 2.0 technologies and information exchanges sprouting on the web. His answer was a vehement no!

I too realized that my question was a bit far fetched: Just as technology advisory firms and analysts continue to have a place, deal consultants continue to thrive primarily due to their offline contacts and networks. The technology to make the leap from offline to online mode certainly exists. Case in point is the popularity of Linkedin  [plug: my profile] a popular professional networking site that claims to attract Digerati who don’t want to be lurking on myspace or facebook.

Though they have become excellent recruiting tools, they haven’t really been able to move beyond this paradigm. For instance, the Wall Street “Journal story Job References You Can't Control” focuses on the recruitment aspects of Linkedin. The paradigm of online recruitment is even older than Web 1.0, going back to an era before the dot.com boom (remember how monster.com or dice.com were 'hot' even a decade ago?). At least in this illustration, 'web 2.0' seems to be the same old wine in a new bottle… Of course, there are perhaps other cooler examples that I need to catch up on.

Which takes us back to what Bob was alluding to: the technologies that enable collaboration certainly exist, and web 2.0 tools are ‘cool’ … but the paradigm of sharing insight and knowledge for a quid-pro-quo that deal architects, consultants and analysts thrive-on is yet to move to the cyberworld. And when that happens…

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An area that I haven’t blogged much about pertains to aspects of offshoring application packages. This includes consulting on the packages, configuring, deploying and maintaining them. The term package is used in a wide range of contexts in the IT space ranging from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to the wide array of custom packages addressing niche areas of technology and business verticals. Most industry verticals have their specializes software packages, be it loans origination, check processing or clearing house systems in the financial world to complex provisioning, engineering and billing packages in the telecommunication world.... and everything in between.

On these lines, I came across this interesting paper by Paul Reynolds that looks at “The Impact of Offshore Resources in ERP Projects”  [Tipoff: offshoreindianews]. The report claims that performance data on the leading India-based systems integrators was also captured, adding "The India-based ERP systems integrators studied are Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam, Tata Consulting Services (TCS), and Wipro." The paper also explains how “The fact of the matter is that off-shoring components of ERP systems integration projects is on the rise, and this trend is not likely to change as long as it allows systems integrators to remain competitive in the marketplace. The real question, however, is what type of impact these offshore resources have the quality of delivery, and, ultimately, client goal attainment.”

While offshoring of ERP projects continues to rise, sourcing of application development involving non-ERP packages get bundled with regular sourcing programs. Besides the offshoring issues we have been looking at in the past, there are a few unique challenges when it comes to outsourcing, and offshoring of (ERP/Non-ERP) packages. For such packages, the knowledge and expertise of technical Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is a key element to capture. Expertise gained by years on the job is certainly a valuable asset for an organization but good management practice also dictates the need to ensure updated system documentation about the current state

Here is my two cents: Most IT shops have system-experts, a.k.a ‘go to’ guys/ladies who have most of the system knowledge and understanding acquired from the years they have been on the job. Capturing and documenting such tacit, undocumented knowledge from SMEs is a key challenge while sourcing packages. This also involves getting a buy-in from SME to share their knowledge and understanding of configuration, tweaks and maintenance processes of systems. 

I will continue to add to this list, and of course your comments and experiences welcome

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)