Managing Offshore Outsourcing of Knowledge-intensive Projects - A People Centric Approach

This paper illustrates a multinational company encountering specific challenges with respect to the leveraging offshore outsourcing for knowledge intensive software development tasks. Following a gathering of corporate experiences and vendor interviews, an active management model was implemented with explicit focus on people and their working environment. The impact of this initiative was immediately visible in terms of increased productivity, improved quality of deliverables and a dramatic reduction in vendor employee turnover. Based on these results we believe that knowledge-intensive projects can be offshore outsourced with a people-centric approach.