Application management: Staff, processes, and methodologies for maintaining, enhancing, and supporting applications.

Application development: Staff, processes, and methodologies for developing new applications.

Business process management: Services to manage and execute enterprise business processes, including the sourcing and staffing of professionals.

Help desk: Provides the professional staff, facilities, and infrastructure to effectively support users of applications and systems. Support services include problem reporting, resolution and tracking, and application usage assistance.

Operations management: A set of services that provides real-time management and operation of the information technology infrastructure supporting critical business operations. Typical services include hardware and software configuration, performance management, capacity planning, problem resolution, problem tracking, backup, and recovery.

Business continuation: Contingency planning and disaster recovery services required for maintaining business operations in the event of information technology infrastructure failure.

The offshore development methodology has a clear distinction of the activities that can be done on-site and offshore. Of the stages specified previously, the first three stages are normally carried out at a clients site. After the high-level design (system specifications) is complete and signed off by the client, further work on detailed design and construction is executed offshore. The client approves the system test plans. Detailed system test specifications are then prepared based on the approved plan. System testing can be carried out either offshore, on-site, or both. For example, BMW of Munich has many manufacturing plants located offshore (e.g., South Africa), which produce world-class products. Similarly, in the IT industry, more and more companies in the West are starting to outsource their legacy systems in countries such as India, China, and the Philippines.

If external interfaces are not available in the offshore environment, these interfaces are stubbed and the rest of the system is tested. These stubs are removed at the client site and the tests are repeated after integrating these external interfaces. Acceptance testing is done by the users who normally provide on-site support during a clients acceptance testing. After completion of acceptance testing on-site, skilled resources can be provided for supporting the implementation. The methodology follows formal structured software development life cycle models and uses the latest structured methodologies while executing software projects.

Benefits of an Offshore Methodology

The added benefits of an offshore methodology are great for organizations that cannot afford to maintain or develop their own solutions or systems at home. In such cases, some of the benefits are:

Productivity improvements.

Substantial cost savings.

Flexible resource base.

Large resource base of highly qualified staff.

Faster ramp-up of resources.

Faster delivery.

Extension of the service day (up to 13 hours). Offshore, yet on-site, advantage. Control and consistency.

Table 4.7 lists the prerequisites for offshore support. Table 4.7: Prerequisites for using offshore methodology