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 …
I started in the offshoring/nearshoring/outsourcing market in 2005 and in that year, I already heard people share negative stories about offshoring. Today, in 2012, this is still the case, maybe even more, as more people have experience. It surprises me …
Last week, I had a conversation with somebody about the differences between Indian and Eastern European programmers. Or maybe we spoke about programmers in general. The thing I find always hard in our business is to answer questions about these …
I am reading a book called ‘100% succesvolle IT-projecten’, written by Klaas Jung and Gerard van de Looi. They write about the key success factors in IT projects. One of the chapters that stand out for me is about relationships and openness. …