Knowledge Overlap in Nearshore Service Delivery

Multinational organizations now increasingly source tasks from nearshore units. While, offshore locations promise superior opportunities for cost savings and access to large scale, flexible workforces, organisations are increasingly distributing work much closer to home (Deliotte 2014). One of the biggest attractions of nearshore locations is proximity. In principle nearshore units are geographically, temporally, and culturally closer to their onshore counterparts reducing the cost and coordination effort to manage distance. Despite the anticipation that onshore units and nearshore units will operate effectively from distinctive and separate knowledge bases, they continue to be bogged down by knowledge overlaps. Knowledge overlaps (KOs) are a duplication of information and know-how of specific migrated activities that allow onshore units to retain control of nearshore units. In this paper, we draw on data from an on-going qualitative case study to demonstrate how nearshore units manage KOs and relinquish control of processes

Effective Strategies for Managing Continuous Consultant Turnover in IT Project Teams

Information Technology project managers have found that collective turnover of consultants lowers code quality, increases knowledge loss and negatively impacts team performance. Within the last decade, companies have begun to see that offshore consultants have a turnover rate greater than 26%, more than double the rates for the rest of the IT consulting industry. Collective turnover also puts additional pressure on the project team, causing work exhaustion and thus additional turnover. The purpose of this single case study was to explore strategies that 6 successful project managers utilized to limit and reduce the impact of collective turnover of their hybrid sourced project teams. Participants were selected through purposeful sampling, based on career experiences and history of successful project execution. Data collection was completed through semi structured face to face interviews, acquisition of company documents including knowledge transfer plans, onboarding documents and turnover statistics. Data were analyzed using coding and key word analysis. Three themes emerged from data collection on the impact collective turnover has on hybrid sourced project teams. First, collective turnover of consultants decreased team performance. Second, improving global team dynamics reduced the negative impact of collective turnover. Last using knowledge transfer tools and project documentation practices reduced the negative impact of collective turnover. This research may contribute to effectively social change by providing managers information and techniques to improve global team dynamics and remove cultural barriers from the workplace