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Offshoring and the Technology Gap

Dave Prior on 5. August 2010

Next week I’ll be co-presenting at the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida with Thushara Wijewardena. Our presentation is called “Why you suck at off shoring, even with Agile”. The plan is to discuss and debate some of the issues people run into when they are doing offshore projects. Thushara, who lives in Sri Lanka, will be covering the offshore side and I’ll be handling onshore. We’ve both got a fair bit of experience in the area, but in order to make sure we’d covered all our bases, we interviewed a number of people to get their take on it. Heading into it, I felt pretty confident, based on my experience, that the majority of the difficulties that onshore managers and teams struggle with are brought about by their own approach and an assumption that offshore must learn to adapt to the onshore way of working. My basic argument was that the onshore teams really had to find a better way to adapt how they approached working with an offshore team if they really wanted to get the most out of them. Working with teams spread across the globe, in different time zones, from different cultural and educational backgrounds is never easy, but I do believe that the responsibility for enabling the offshore team falls largely on the onshore team’s shoulders. (more…)

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Tags: Agile 2010, off shore