Offshoring

Fredi Schmidli led an interesting discussion on the challenges of offshoring.

We covered a full range of topics from the opportunities to the different business models to cultural issues and how to do hiring.

Personally, the cultural aspect was one of the most interesting (non-)issue was the cultural aspects. A C++ programmer in Brazil probably has more in common with a C++ programmer in Switzerland than say a university professor with a construction worker in either country.

The hardest part about talking about your own company is not getting into “proud parent mode” and Fredi showed excellent restraint, by presenting the business, what works for them, and what doesn’t work. With another player in the same market and project leader from a large insurance company in the room, it made for a rich exchange of information.

We talked about a few links today:

• Fredi Schmidli’s Presentation
• Jeff Sutherlands “Secret Sauce” for distributed scrum (paper & presentation)
• Peter Stevens’ Double Worst Case strategy for valuing software projects.

Thank you Fredi and also for swissITbridge’s sponsoring of the Webinar infrastructure.