Many customers might have outsourced the IT Projects to different countries through different IT vendors. This blogs can give some thoughts on their current practices changes [if needed] towards “Onsite & Offshore co-ordination with Virtual team management. ”

1. When the IT activities are outsourced to other countries, the customers might need to evaluate their internal review process for offshore team management and delivery.
2. Let us assume the customer handles more than 500 outsourced resources globally in different countries.
3. All these teams need to have their local delivery managers. And atleast one onsite manager for onsite/offshore co-ordination.
4. When the work packets are segregated to each vendor by country, the customer needs to identify the deliverable activities month by month.
5. During these activities segregation, the required inputs for offshore teams need to be identified and make sure to deliver as their entry criteria to start the work.
6. During the activities planning, execution and review phases, the relevant onsite manager need to be involved and the customer approval need to be acquired to make sure customer manager is aware of the activities and the delivery output is honored for billing purpose. [Which is very important for an IT services vendor].
7. The customer managers also need to make sure the teams are attending the required calls periodically and they are getting into the shoes of the required activities.
8. The time difference of different countries needs to be followed and fix the feasible timings for onsite and offshore team calls.
9. Each teams weekly reports by resource need to be supplied to the customer managers through the e-mails or to save the cycle time online tools can be used.
10. The online tools should have features to port the project plans and the activities tracking mechanism.
11. The projects issues register features also need to be available online for the virtual teams.
12. The customer approval process need to be there for any new activity or extension of the current activity.
13. The resources replacement or termination process should be available.
14. Each resources project activity and training process need to be automated and it should be linked to the activity and also to the performance evaluation tools.
15. Once the team function starts, their performance management need to be available online.
16. It can be integrated to the activities tracking system. Against to each activity the mapped resources work need to be reviewed and evaluate by activity wise.
17. For every quarter the resources need to be evaluated against to the performance by customer and also by the manager. The team manager need to educate the resource to upgrade his/her skills as per the project/customer needs.
18. Infact, it helps the resource also plan their learning activity in this speedy IT learning culture.
19. It helps to the vendor and the customer to evaluate the resource stage by stage. And later on CSAT rating will be easy for the managers of customer and teams.
20. All the above process steps are required to follow just to manage the virtual teams, which is apart from the other operational or enterprise architecture tools integration and their implementation.

I hope with this process/methods no resource will have bad feedback from customer and also from their managers. Their retention policies can be implemented well by the vendor and customer easily. And the resources also feels happy on this healthy work environment/culture.

Please feel free to contact for any consulting support.