Category Archives: Outsourcing

Cultural differences: is offshore or nearshore easier?Culturele verschillen: is offshore of nearshore makkelijker?

When people across cultures collaborate, there’s always an influence of culture on the communication. When they’re working distributed across the globe, there are other factors that can influence communication. What I always find striking is that people assume there are ‘more’ or ‘less’ cultural differences between one country or another. I always wonder whether it’s true and whether it matters.

How to Overcome Cultural differences when Managing Offshore or Nearshore teams?Hoe Culturele verschillen te overkomen bij het managen van Offshore of Nearshore teams?

We recently launched our new eBook about offshoring and nearshoring : How to Overcome Cultural differences when Managing Offshore or Nearshore teams

In the world of offshoring and global collaboration, there is no topic that is more widely discussed that cultural differences. Or maybe there is one: communication. People with experience in managing remote teams often cite communication as their biggest challenge. But what is communication? And if communication is the problem, where do we start the solution? In most cases, one of the best starting point is ‘culture’ (the others being people and process, which we describe in our other books).

3 pitfalls in offshoring and nearshoring3 valkuilen in offshoring ennearshoring

Few weeks ago, I gave a presentation on our company’s event. The visitors were both experienced offshorers and people planning to offshore their software development. One of the questions that arose was ‘what are the pitfalls in offshoring’. While I could write a book about this (and I actually did), I have a top three:

Reshoring: truth or myth?Reshoring: waarheid of mythe?

Are companies moving IT jobs back to their home country? Is offshoring on the reverse? I often hear people say that it’s the case. It often sounds like ‘hard facts’, so I decided to do a small research.

The first thing I found is that there is no research. There is hardly any research about the countries people offshore or nearshore to (at least from the Netherlands I couldn’t find any data). There is also no research about the net effect of jobs moving abroad versus jobs ‘coming back’. Maybe a wake up call to some researchers?

How to Organize Offshore and Nearshore Collaboration?

We recently launched our new eBook about offshoring and nearshoring :
‘How to Organize Offshore and Nearshore Collaboration’

The main questions came up when managing teams that are geographically distributed are:- How do you organize a remote collaboration? What process should you introduce? How do you communicate your requirements? How do you ensure that people are doing what they are supposed to be doing? Nowadays, the technological infrastructure is in place and there are many companies working with globally distributed teams. At the same time, a lot of people look for a proven way to organize remote work. In this eBook, nine practitioners from different parts of the world and from different organizations share best practices based on their experiences.