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The Key to Offshore Success: Superb Onshore Project Management

Companies that outsource and more specifically offshore IT work quite often have difficulty managing their offshore vendors. The issue may lie in communication challenges that include time zone differences, regulatory and compliance issues (especially for banks), and language and cultural issues. Companies typically don't have someone in-house who can successfully and completely coordinate with the offshore team (in the middle of the night), all while understanding the "offshore" work culture, and sometimes the "offshore" language.

Despite common vendor management difficulties, companies that have challenging vendor relationships typically don't end these relationships not because of any particular loyalty to a vendor; but because as stated in a report by ITM Corporation, "it can be difficult and disruptive to terminate a vendor relationship once initiated." Vendors, therefore, have little incentive to make being managed an easier process for their clients.

Hundsun Global is not interested in clients that stay only because it is harder to leave. Hundsun Global strives not only to delight our clients with our technical fluency, and responsiveness; but also with the ease with which we can be managed. We have established a development center in the US where our technology director and project leaders are based. This is the focal point for client support.

While the software engineers in Hundsun's US development center may not always perform development or testing work (they are, of course, available for this as well), they always serve as liaisons between our US clients and our China-based software developers, designers, and architects. Our clients don't need to wake up in the middle of the night to speak with a senior technical person intimately familiar with the project. The phrase "follow the sun" has been getting a lot of attention. Hundsun believes that follow the sun should not only be implemented as a software development model; follow the sun should also apply to vendor management, and vendor project management availability.

The benefits of being an easy vendor to manage are reciprocal. A vendor benefits by building a long-term and value add relationship and the client benefits by increased cost savings, as well as having a vendor that is intimately familiar with the client's business and technology. According to the report by ITM Corporation, "IT executives are shifting their perspective about vendor management from a transactional view of selecting and initiating vendors to a strategic view of building and leveraging vendor value." Furthermore, "...financial institutions see a savings of 10-30 percent as a result of more effective IT vendor management." Bottom line: The key to long-term offshore success is having superb onshore resources.

Seth Harlem is Director of Business Development at Hundsun Global (HG) and a member of the board of the Maryland China Business Council. He is based in New York City and can be reached at sharlem@hgsamerica.com.