iDecisions

Offshore Services
Making it work
Offshore consultants admit that they have made mistakes in the data warehousing domain, but they've learned from them. Many have learned data warehousing "on the job" -- often at the client's expense -- but now have the domain expertise to deliver quality results. They have also implemented processes and controls to ensure better, more efficient communications between onshore and offshore teams.

For instance, offshore firms realize that certain positions must remain on site: analysis, design and end-user support, as well as one or more project managers. In addition, firms have learned that they need to keep an offshore development team working during U.S. hours to resolve immediate issues and concerns.

Of course, these steps often increase the cost of having the offshore team doing the work in the first place. The hiring firm must discover the break-even point when the cost savings from offshoring are not worth the hassle of maintaining a development team halfway around the world.

Based on my research, here are a few keys to making the offshore model work in data warehousing:

Use a trusted partner. The most successful offshore projects are done by consulting firms that have proven themselves to the client company over the course of many projects and years.
Go slowly. Don't outsource the entire data warehousing project. Outsource easy items and tasks, such as ETL coding or unit testing, so that you can evaluate the skills of the offshore team and see how the relationship works. This allows you to refine communication processes in a less stressful environment.
Assess experience and stability. Understand how much data warehousing experience the members of your offshore partner have. Also find out how stable their team is. You don't want key players to turn over during your project, especially on-site project managers who can be easily lured away by the competition or other U.S. jobs.
Assess security. If the security and confidentiality of your data is a serious concern, avoid doing business with offshore firms that work with your competitors or in your industry. Also find out what controls they apply to workers who access your data and how they partition their data centers to avoid commingling data from multiple firms.
Evaluate processes. Make sure the offshore team has put in place processes and controls to ensure effective communications. This includes using detailed requirements and specification templates and establishing clear channels of communication between on-site and offsite project managers and developers.
Ensure technology transfer. Make sure you don't outsource your ability to run and maintain the system and educate users once the project is over. Make sure that the offshore firm transfers their knowledge to your team members.

Execution is the key,
As in any data warehousing project, the key is execution. Offshore consulting firms will eventually figure out how to deliver data warehousing projects efficiently and effectively. In fact, their real advantage may not be their cost structures, but their recognition that the key to their success is ensuring effective communications. Offshore teams may end up overcompensating for this intrinsic deficiency in their model and surpass home-based development efforts.

I've seen many U.S.-based data warehousing projects fail because the business and technical teams couldn't or wouldn't communicate. It didn't matter that they were located on the same floor in the same building. They may as well have been working on different continents and speaking different languages. Just because developers are born and bred in your geography doesn't guarantee that your data warehouse will be a success.

In the end, the key to the success of any data warehousing project is execution. The nationality of the person who runs the project doesn't matter, nor does where the work occurs. If the project manager is highly competent, the developers understand the business and have strong technical skills, and there is tight alignment between the business and technical teams, then a project will invariably succeed.