I had the opportunity of addressing a room filled with owners of small, medium sized and large businesses and asked them this question “Are you taking advantage of outsourcing?” I could hear the crickets chirping as they all stared back …
I have just finished reading the book about Zappos ‘delivering happiness‘. I love the story and ideas in it and I am exploring how it applies to our company. My general view on the business world is that most is …
Most teams that are doing agile development and are using Scrum have heard about agile retrospectives. Often they also start doing retrospectives after one or more sprints. Some teams keep on doing them, but I’ve heard a lot of teams …
In my previous article I described some lessons learned on failures that I made in building my Global IT Staffing company Bridge. I have few more important lessons that are more on the entrepreneurial side than on the offshore management …
A few weeks back I wrote an article about What makes global teamwork, offshoring, nearshoring and remote cooperations so interesting. I have a critical father in law who told me that I described some pitfalls that I walked into and asked …
One of the mindset differences that often lead to issues in cooperations across cultures is quality versus speed. I believe this is a cultural difference that needs to receive attention in any offshore collaboration. It can result both from a …
The past years I have been experimenting a lot with scrum in our offshore and nearshore cooperations. One of the most challenging parts of distributed scrum (the variant of scrum where team members cooperate from different locations) is organizing the …
I have spent a good number of years encouraging both small and large business owners to take advantage of outsourcing, by hiring outsourced employees to run certain business functions. I have even written a book on the subject called …
In this article, I would like to share (a short version of) my personal story with you. I have done a short interview with myself: What drew me to this market? An odd combination of events. Short after the millennium …
As most of you are likely busy planning and strategizing for 2013, I want to plant an idea. When you think about offshoring, your first idea will likely be ‘ah, low costs’. But is this really the case and is …
Some small business owners wrongly assume that offshore outsourcing services are for the fortune 500 companies alone. Also, the mere thought of entrusting their business functions to an offshore vendor disturbs small business owners. Yet, small businesses are one of …
In my work as an agile and lean consultant, there’s sometimes a lot of discussion about “processes”. People I work with use different definitions of processes. Agile teams sometimes resist to processes, when they refer to the agile manifesto that …