Opening an offshore development center - ensure you check off this list

If you are planning to open an offshore development center, there are few points that could help you ensure a reliable and durable business. Below are some of the points that I list from my personal experiences.

- If you are starting your new operations offshore, always start with few people. Optimally try to have 3 people per division / team to begin with - a lead and 2 product experts. I have seen companies recruiting big with each team constituting more than 10 people which ended up with more politics and little output.

- Identify people from your on-shore team with a good understanding of the culture and society of the place. If none are available, try to recruit an agency that can help. It is worth the money upfront than failing totally. Understanding the local culture and people is important to identify the right talent and doing business in the future.

- Your first team should be the path leaders for the future team that would be recruited. So ensure you put your future money on safe bets - the best possible talent.

- Look out for people with talent - dirty jerseys, and not people who can talk great. To my knowledge the best talent in India are not great talkers or presenters.

- Provide necessary training for these leaders. Ensure the training session is not crowded with too many people. Get the best experts from for the corresponding products from your on-shore team to train the folks.

- Lay down a process for communication between the on-shore and off-shore teams. A process on who or which team members, when and how the team's would interact.

- It is important for on-shore team to identify key members and engage them as the team grows. The old guard or some times a new guard could bring in politics. From my personal experience, there can be people who specialize in politics and in turn destroy the team. It is difficult to identify these talented people given that the place could be culturally different but the effort in trying to identify people is worth the effort.

- Keep a tight tab on the status and expectations. The work culture of the two teams could be different and hence expectations on what each party states can be different. It is mandatory to document explicitly the expectations to as much detail as possible. For eg: if a feature has to be delivered, it has to be coded, documented and tested.