Best practices in setting up and managing offshore IT projects based on past experiences and lessons learnt

1. Offshore IT Projects
Best Practices

2. Agenda
• Who am I?
• Outsourcing Best Practices
o Why
o What
o Who
o How

3. Who am I?
• Started career with Sapient
Corporation
• Helped setup Sapient’s global
delivery model and first India
development center in 2001
• Last Corporate Job –
Application Director at Dow
Jones
o Managed several outsourced
projects as part of this
• Now -> Helping several small to
medium sized IT services
companies to setup their
offshore software development
delivery practice
o People, Process, Tools
Vasantha Gullapalli
http://about.me/vgullapalli
http://in.linkedin.com/in/vgulla

4. Best Practices
•Track Record
•Within your budget
•Empower
•Accountability
•Communication
•Continuous Improvement
•Clearly Defined
requirements
•Do not require regular
interactions with local
teams
•Better use of resources
•Local team gets to focus on more
mission critical operations
Why What
How Who

5. Why
• Each company will have different reasons for
considering outsourcing and specifically
offshore outsourcing
• Typical reasons
o Cost
o Round the clock operations
o Ability to have onsite resources focus on more mission critical tasks

6. Who
• Each company will have a different process to
select their offshore development partner
• Typical considerations
o Budget
o References
o Domain Experience
o Track Record

7. What
• Projects/Activities that have minimum day-to-day
changes and interactions with local teams
• Clearly defined projects or parts of projects
o Projects with well-defined scope/boundaries and or parts of projects
that can independently executed
• Does not mean no dependencies with other teams, just means
dependencies are also well-defined
o If requirements are not well-defined, take time upfront to do so
o Support Projects – Production support and small enhancements make
a good candidate

8. How
• Establish Accountability and Ownership clearly
• Empower the team with all the information and context
needed to understand the big picture
o Make expectations clear – clear list of deliverables
o Share all standards (design, UI, coding) you have ahead of
time
o Treat them as an extension to your local team
• Hybrid methodology - Pure Agile won’t work until the team
and delivery rhythm is established
o Take time upfront to do detailed requirements analysis and
technical design with review process until you gain
confidence
o Agile development model with frequent demos with early
focus on QA

9. How - continued
• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
o Daily Stand-ups – if needed
o Weekly Status Calls, Weekly Status Reports – Mandatory
o Common document repository
o Common Issues and Bugs tracker
• Proactive Reviewing
o Design Reviews
o Code Reviews
o Sprint Demos
o Sprint QA
• Continuous Improvement
o Be open to learn from mistakes and alter the process until it works
o Each context is different and so there is no one size fits all process

10. Thank you
Questions, Suggestions: vgulla@yahoo.com