Managing Offshore IT

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