Achieving Better Collaboration for IT Offshoring

Along with globalization, offshoring strategy has been attractive to more and more IT companies and regarded as an industry changer as tremendous benefits can be enabled from this strategy. However, considering the potential risks and uncertainties, offshoring can also be risky and even lead to failure or huge loss because of the inefficiency and obstacles in collaboration among offshoring teams. To be able to guarantee better collaboration for IT offshoring, both related theories about offshoring and results from the empirical study have been combined and analyzed. As for the methodology applied in the study, a case company Sigma IT & Management is mainly investigated for phenomenon exploration as this company has a long-term IT offshoring strategic partner in Ukraine. Qualitative data is valued greatly in obtaining a deeper knowledge of various opinions and views from the representatives out of the offshoring team. As an exploratory-interpretive study, it primarily uses interviews with text analysis for results generation. The conclusion of this study to IT offshoring collaboration is twofold. Firstly from the functional perspective, it fills the shortage of supportive checklist for project managers to guarantee a better offshoring collaboration, as well as the proper methods in evaluating interaction barriers among offshoring teams. Secondly from the individual perspective, this thesis study is concluded with a table of success factors to improve the bi-direction communication and the collaboration efficiency for offshoring teams