Comments on: Outsourcing and offshoring projects to India: “Different Worlds, Different Ways”

By: Ami Lovaas

Ami Lovaas — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 03:12:33 +0000

Outsourcing Projects to India

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By: Amit Jain

Amit Jain — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 15:12:47 +0000

Outsourcing or Offshoring to India, there is more to it then just cost savings. Often the complaint from the customers is that they have to spend way too much time over the calls, emails with the Indian team that it sometimes shadows the cost advantage and large numbers that you get in India.
But the success in offshoring needs the customer team to be conversant with the constraints and advantages of working in a follow the Sun model.
1) Always look for some brief F2F interaction in the beginning of each engagement between the key members of both the teams. This helps bridge most of the cultural barriers.
2) Have daily scrum calls/video calls
3) Rely on the vendor manager for his/her judgement of team skills
4) Always insist on a technical manager not just pure play line manager which some of the vendors would push for.
5) Involve the vendor key team in strategy discussion

The list can be longer based on type of engagement, type of project, etc. But bottom-line is that success of offshoring depends on a joint effort by the 2 teams. The collaboration has to be more than the co-located teams.

By: Viney Chaddha

Viney Chaddha — Sun, 03 May 2015 17:23:03 +0000

In my experience of dealing with teams from various countries across the globe I would say the following:

1. Culture does play a role but not from the religious point of view, 2+2=4 in any culture, may it be North American, European, Japanese, Asian….. The issue has more to do with what is valued at work place, in India the an employee who “knows” about everything is valued more, that results in “jack of all trade” situation while the west and Japan (especially) the value is more for a specialist role. I say Japan especially is due to the fact the I have dealt with R&D engineers of a large Japanese automotive company, name withheld, having engineers working on a COMPONENT for their life, they know ins and out of the component. Loyalty to the company and the working tenure of the employee in the company is far higher in Japan than anywhere else resulting in “super-specialists”. So the specialist would have an edge over the jack of all trades. THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT IN INDIA ONE WOULD NOT FIND SPECIALIST.

The next point is more important than the first but when coupled together they form a potent combination

2. The self confidence of the engineers is lower, justifiable though. The engineer in India is exposed to far lower lab facilities in India than those in the west, this results in lower self confidence among the fresh or relatively fresh engineers. This is exactly why they need more and more of information as the larger the amount of information that they have the more confident they feel.

In a nut shell my suggestion on the outsourcing would be to choose the company not just on financials but also on the kind of training that the company provides to its employees especially at the junior level and depending on the size of the company and IF POSSIBLE to dig into the educational credentials of the employees of the company as there are large number of engineering colleges in India, some of them operating out of very small building and some of the colleges like IITs have world ranking as well.

Viney Chaddha

By: Amol

Amol — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 17:10:36 +0000

I think anyone who hasn’t spent considerable time in India makes up these simplified assumptions and claims he/ she know India and indian culture. After living in 5 different countries and being born in India I have one simple thing to say, India doesn’t have any specific culture. E.g. people from urban background and rural background behave as if they are from different cultures except they use same spices in food, that too in different quantities. Another example u sighted a cast system which reflects why we stand up when boss or customer walks down to us, it’s lot more than you are understanding; I used to stand up whenever my grandfather or my uncle had serious talk with me even though we are from same cast 🙂 Anyways there is always something to learn for everyone just wanted to pass on a message, you don’t know indian culture unless you spend considerable time there; and studying Indian culture from literature is biggest mistake one can easily commit.

By: Patrick Mataix

Patrick Mataix — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 12:30:06 +0000

In reply to Aloke. Interesting point! Thank you Aloke.

By: Aloke

Aloke — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 12:27:55 +0000

I find that of CEO level cultural mismatch is more important than ability. When this will vanish that we can expect growth and customer satisfaction.
Aloke