Delivering IT Service Management Consulting from Offshore – Part 1
By Bruno Calver
So, it has been some time since my last post, that’s because I have recently been working on an IT Service Management project from Offshore, not that that should be an excuse to suspend blogging! The project was to design an IT Service Management audit framework for a U.S. finance customer.
In this post I want to talk about the specific experience of working offshore, as well as some general observations regarding working in a company with an offshore/onsite consulting delivery model. I think the picture is slightly different when it comes to high value services such as consulting in comparison to operational support and delivery activities.
First, how was it delivering a project from offshore? To be honest, a radical change to how I normally work. In my previous roles, a mixture of project management and onsite consulting, I have always been client facing and I found it to be one of the more enjoyable aspects of my work. Working offshore certainly required an adjustment in approach! Let’s start, however, by looking at the positive aspects of the onsite/offshore consulting model.
First, having an offshore consultant very much focuses activity on outputs and deliverables. The onsite consultant manages the client end and assignment approach, whilst the offshore consultant’s efforts are channelled towards tangible outcomes and products. I guess the enhanced productivity is based on the division of labour principle.
I also found that with so many colleagues around me (as all the offshore consulting team work in the same office), I always had excellent help and support on tap. This is in contrast to the normal situation where you are on a client site and you are on your own or with just one or two colleagues. One area I received a fair amount of assistance was in using some of the advanced functions in Microsoft Excel, my skills were a bit rusty!! This was not the only area, of course, and the pool of knowledge sat around me across a whole range of IT service management disciplines was very reassuring and often useful.
In addition, there is the well known benefit of what I call the ‘relay race’, what I mean by this is that the onsite consultant briefs the offshore consultant late in the evening, they go to sleep and when they wake up and the offshore consultant has already progressed the project by a day. Most work is serial in my experience so in this sense the time difference is a significant accelerator to delivery. A simple example would be when working on a spreadsheet tool, two people can not edit it at the same time and it is tricky to split the work if formulas are inter-dependent across work areas. Of course, the handover from onsite to offshore must be very carefully managed otherwise it is easy to spend a day offshore working in a slightly divergent direction.
One other general advantage I wanted to mention is that with the offshore consulting model there is a lot more time for practice development. This, I think, is because there is a much lower cost of research and capability building by offshore resources, again this presents the added bonus of more collateral and artefacts to back up consulting engagements.
These benefits, combined with the obvious cost advantage (which is considerable, having seen the difference in rates between purely onsite providers) are a significant bonus to the client, things get done quicker and at a reduced cost.
In my next blog I am going to talk about some of the challenges we face with offshore consulting, which I alluded to in my introduction. I will also discuss some of the things that we do to try and ameliorate some of these issues…
