Scenario 1

Company X was looking to open an offshore office in India to access lower cost, higher quality labor.

They looked internally for advice from people with knowledge of India to assist with the project. An internal person was promoted as an SME (Subject Matter Expert) and was consulted for all actions pertaining to opening an office.

The expert decided on the location, facility and used his personal contacts to help with the setup and hire the initial team.

What Resulted

The company spent 6 months of internal resources, took several trips to India. They hired a team based on the suggestions of the internal team member. Within 1 year all the team in India had left or were let go and the office was closed. The company had not achieved any results form the team, could not find replacements for the people that left, lost moral of the local team and spent a lot of money.

What had happened

SME
Even though the employee was from India and had visited the country often he had been a resident of the US for over 10 years. He had only gone to India for visiting family and not for business. His knowledge of the business environment was limited and only to the location and his experience from 10 years ago. Over that time India had changed considerably.

Location
The location chosen was not optimal for the company. It was decided on by the internal person for convenience to be close to his family when he visits India and also because of the initial set of people that the employee knew. The location did not have a large pool of talent to find suitable replacements and to grow the team.

India Team
The initial team hired in India had strong relationships with the US employee. Any business issues were being communicated to the US employees and this was leading to lower moral.

What the company could have done

1. Create a steering committee to define and document what they were looking to achieve and in what time frame. Define short term and long term goal.
2. Used this to determine the appropriate team members and their future roles once the offshore team was developed.
3. Communicated business objectives with company and employees so they did not feel threatened by the new company strategy.
4. Created a Budget and Milestone, with defined metrics to track against.
5. Used unbiased information for deciding location, facility and new hire team.
6. Chosen a location with the companies short term and long term plan in mind.
7. Setup regular meetings to track progress against milestone.