Author Archives: Hugo Messer

About Hugo Messer

Hugo Messer is a Dutch entrepreneur, distributed agile team specialist, and author. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Global, a software services provider, and ekipa.co., an agile coaching agency. He has been building and managing teams around the world for the past several years. His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make global cooperation work.

Why choose an offshore colleague instead of a local employee?Waarom kiezen voor een offshore collega in plaats van een lokale werknemer?Varför ska man välja en offshore-kollega istället för att anställa lokalt?Warum ausländische Kollegen ortsansässigen Angestellten vorziehen?

21 March 2012 Offshoring

When speaking to software companies in Europe, I often get to hear ‘we want to have people in our office’. This is something I fully understand. Having people in your own office makes it easier for organization than having people …

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How big are attrition rates in offshore or nearshore teams?Hoe is het personeelsverloop in offshore en nearshore teams?Hur stor är personalomsättningen i offshore- och nearshore-team?Wie hoch sind die Ausfallraten bei offshore oder nearshore Teams?

29 February 2012 Cultural Differences

  I frequently hear from people that an aspect which affects the effectiveness of their offshore team is high attrition. It is commonly understood that attrition rates in India are in the range of 20-40% per year which means that …

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What are the Americans doing that we Europeans are not doing?Wat doen de Amerikanen dat wij Europeanen niet doen?Vad gör amerikanerna som européerna inte gör?Was die Amerikaner den Europäern voraushaben

17 January 2012 Cultural Differences

I frequently speak to people in India that run BPO or software firms and I am always astonished by the numbers. People tell me that they started their software company 5 years back and employ 2000 people today. In Management …

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Nearshoring or offshoring: which works better? Nearshoring of offshoring: wat werkt beter?Nearshoring eller offshoring: vilket fungerar bäst?Nearshoring oder Offshoring: Welche Alternative ist die Bessere?

22 December 2011 Offshoring

A question that I often hear is whether offshoring is better than nearshoring or vice versa. First, let’s get straight on the difference. Nearshoring is when you move work to a country that is nearby your own country. Wikipedia speaks about a …

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Dutch government: offshoring is no ground for collective firingDutch government: offshoring is no ground for collective firingHolländska regeringen: Offshoring är ingen giltig grund för kollektiv uppsägningNiederländische Regierung: Offshoring ist keine Begründung für kollektive Entlassungen

14 December 2011 Offshoring

The Dutch political party PvdA (Labor Party) will propose a bill to ban collective firing on the grounds of offshoring. The party declared so on its blog. I think that this way of thinking does not fit with our day and …

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