The demand for offshoring is a keeper despite of the increasing costs (labour) in the supplier region. In our conversations with the product managers (manufacturing) and IT managers revealed that they are still planning and looking at the opportunities for offshore outsourcing. The collapsing economy forces the companies to pay more attention to required capabilities for a successful offshoring strategy …

A journalist from Computable, asked me to give a reaction to this very interesting theorem: ?Only by moving as much as possible work to low-income countries like India, Dutch ICT-businesses can keep their head above the water.? Do you agree with this theorem and why? My answer is ?yes and no?. We offer offshoring services ourselves and I understand the …

I had the opportunity of addressing a room filled with owners of small, medium sized and large businesses and asked them this question “Are you taking advantage of outsourcing?”  I could hear the crickets chirping as they all stared back at me. A large number of organizations only choose to outsource because they want to lower the cost of production …

I have just finished reading the book about Zappos ‘delivering happiness‘. I love the story and ideas in it and I am exploring how it applies to our company. My general view on the business world is that most is about objectivity, about money, about ‘boring stuff’. Many businesses are built around things that are far away from affecting humans …

Most teams that are doing agile development and are using Scrum have heard about agile retrospectives. Often they also start doing retrospectives after one or more sprints. Some teams keep on doing them, but I?ve heard a lot of teams that didn?t do them frequently, or stopped doing them after some time. The reason I hear most is that they …

In my previous article I described some lessons learned on failures that I made in building my Global IT Staffing company Bridge. I have few more important lessons that are more on the entrepreneurial side than on the offshore management side but I believe they are helpful in building any international cooperation. The failure I described in my last month’s …

A few weeks back I wrote an article about What makes global teamwork, offshoring, nearshoring and remote cooperations so interesting. I have a critical father in law who told me that I described some pitfalls that I walked into and asked me ‘but what did you learn from the mistakes you made?’ So I devote this article to that question, because …

One of the mindset differences that often lead to issues in cooperations across cultures is quality versus speed. I believe this is a cultural difference that needs to receive attention in any offshore collaboration. It can result both from a country’s cultural perspective as well as a company culture. To illustrate the point, I will share an example. In one …

The past years I have been experimenting a lot with scrum in our offshore and nearshore cooperations. One of the most challenging parts of distributed scrum (the variant of scrum where team members cooperate from different locations) is organizing the sprint planning well.  The typical situation in smaller teams (especially for companies that recently started with offshoring, they typically start …

  I have spent a good number of years encouraging both small and large business owners to take advantage of outsourcing, by hiring outsourced employees to run certain business functions. I have even written a book on the subject called “Outsource This”. There are so many advantages of hiring an outsourced employee, some of these advantages are:  Outsourced employees will …

 In this article, I would like to share (a short version of) my personal story with you. I have done a short interview with myself: What drew me to this market? An odd combination of events. Short after the millennium I was working in a publishing company in Amsterdam. They published city maps, sponsored by advertisers from each city. The …