Question

Use the FIVE-STEP decision making is shown in the answer.

You are manager of IT project that involves two dozen offshore outsource worker who will do program development and testing. IDENTIFY several potential issues that could arise due to the outsourcing arrangement. What SPECIFIC STEPS would you take to improve the likelihood for success of the project?

Answer 1

As an IT manger, the potential issues that I can see with outsourcing agreement are:

• It might upset the domestic staff, as employees will be laid off in favor of the lower wage outsourced employment. The remaining employees might also become bitter towards the company and lose morale affecting firm’s overall performance.
• The cultural and language differences between host and outsourcing country can lead to misunderstanding between project teams in different countries.
• There will also a compromise with the customer data’s security, as it will be shared with a third party.
• The company will lose the knowledge and experience, which the outsourced workers will gain.
• It will increase company’s dependency on foreign workforce, and will be detrimental if the company wants to build IT infrastructure in the future.

To improve the likelihood of project success is would:

• Identify the problem at hand: assess the potential issues at hand, and highlight the most important ones we need to deal with, that have the most pressing effect on our project performance. Here, cultural and language differences seems to be the biggest hurdle for the project team’s performance.
• Obtain information: I would gather the employees with the require expertise within the organization, and would try to include the ones who can speak the native country’s language.
• Make prediction about the future: I would predict the potential areas of the project, where communication issues can delay the project, or affect its quality. Also, I would predict the ways we can resolve potential conflicts that may arise due to the misunderstandings.
• Choosing among alternatives: here we will have to make the decision and choose amongst the potential team members for the project, and also chose the optimum conflict resolution methods for problems that arise.
• Implement the decision: Here we would assign the project team, based on the best possible combination of expertise and language knowledge and handle conflicts by the optimum way as and when they arise.