An Approach to Effectively Transfer Knowledge and Accelerate the Movement of Software Services Offshore

Offshore team spend considerable amount of time to acquire the skill to become fully productive in providing software services. We describe a knowledge transfer approach to effectively accelerate offshoring software services by shortening the knowledge transfer (KT) time for the teams to become productive. The knowledge transfer approach has three steps: 1) Defining detailed role-specific learning plans for all roles, 2) Creating learning tasks and activities with specific learning goals for all days of the first six months, 3) Validating the acquired knowledge. In addition, the approach required the complete accountability of support functions such as Human Resources (HR) Department. Hence engagement specific service level agreements were defined for these support activities. The experience of using this knowledge transfer approach in a mission-critical offshore project within a large multinational company is discussed and results presented.