The Nearshoring Option

FountainBlue's March 16 Connections event was on the topic of The Nearshoring Options.

In this month's Connections event, we described Nearshoring options, in comparison to off-shoring options, share some Nearshoring success stories from large high-tech, life science companies as well as a smaller start-up's successes. Our experienced panel of experts shared criteria they used to determine outsourcing solutions. Our attendees shared their challenges and successes with our panel:

• Facilitator Matt Perez EVP of Engineering and founder of NearSoft
• Panelist Brian Higgins, Manager at KLA Tencor
• Panelist Dr John Linehan, Stanford Professor
• Panelist Steve Mezak, author of Software without Boundaries
• Panelist Ray Scott, CEO, Axolotl

We discussed how offshoring and Nearshoring options impact the company's business model in the long-term and in the short term. Below are notes from our discussion.

Nearshoring is an attractive option for companies that need to partner with providers outside their organizations to meet their development needs and timelines.

• Educated, intelligent developers are becoming more and more available
• More experienced technicians are being trained even in the United States
• US citizens well acculturated into the American society are leading development firms from their native countries and can serve as interpreter/facilitator between development teams
• Nearshoring addresses the time zone challenges presented by working with countries on the 'other side of the world' (of course that's all relative)
• When issues arise, they may be solved more quickly when time zone factors aren't as heavily involved

Before you consider a Nearshoring partner, consider the following factors:

• The education level of the country/organization/people that you're working with
• The infrastructure support for the country you're considering
• Your personal software development needs
• The culture of your organization, and that of the country you're outsourcing to
• The relationship you have with the organization
• How close the Nearshoring team is to the rest of your teams
• The political and economic stability of the country you're working with
• The time zone question - how many time zones away are they and how would that impact yourself and others on your team? would you need to adjust to early morning or late evening hours, and which are you more comfortable with?
• In general, minimize the education, communication, distance, etc., separation between yourself and your development partners in order to maximize your degree of control

To make the best use of Nearshoring relationships:

• Make priorities and statements of work clear, while also communicating and adjusting as needed
• Consider whether you're using Agile method (like UML, SCRUM) which is more collaborative and iterative or Waterfall with complete specs
• Use communication tools to facilitate and coordinate development efforts; these might include IRise, RavenFlow, BuyProcess (Unified Modeling Language), MS Project, Online software as a service tools such as Artifact Software, Clarison, etc.,
• Build the largest pipeline for information flow between the various development players so that you can better stream video, audio and other data; real-time video tools might include Microsoft or IBM Lotus
• Understand specialties for each region
• Understand travel and infrastructure development limitations/constraints (there are tier 1 areas in India like Bangalore and tier 2 ones like New Delhi)
• Consider copyright requirements not just for your direct providers, but also for their providers

For more information:

• See Nearsoft's Outsourcing Risks page

http://www.nearsoft.com/outsourcingrisks.php

Take Accelerance's software IT readiness test http://www.accelerance.com/readinessTest.php3

Take Accelerance's Vision Resourcessm - Outsourced Team Selection Service from Accelerance http://www.accelerance.com/visionResources.htm

Subscribe to the Accelerance RunTime eZine http://www.accelerance.com/runtimeSignup.htm