What’s the secret to reducing cost and accelerating the delivery of offshore software development? Move business analysis offshore, too! That's right. There’s now a growing body of evidence that doing so will reduce the costs of developing requirements while still maintaining high quality (Powell, Piccoli, & Ives, Winter 2004), (Nath, Sridhar, Adya, & Malik, October-December 2008). At Coherent Solutions, our experience indicates that companies will achieve greater efficiency from their programming staff by co-locating business analysts with their offshore programming team.

In fact, we’ve established four rules that will get you there quickly, based on our success with hundreds of offshore development projects: 1) wait until your offshore team has gained a critical degree of knowledge; 2) assign a local liaison to construct high-level analysis with face-to-face needs; 3) move the requirements details offshore; and 4) perform early and frequent reviews and approvals with your internal customers.

First, wait until your offshore team has a critical body of knowledge. There is a considerable amount to learn at your location. If the offshore team is to provide the same kind of quality as a local team, they need time and experience to acquire the institutional memory gained by your local team over years of experience with working with you and your customers. You may accelerate this transition by bringing the offshore team to your site at the beginning of the project. But, even afterward, there will be a lot for them to learn. So don’t start the transition too soon.

Second, assign a local analysis liaison. Industry experts agree—and our experience bears it out—that a local liaison is a key contributor to success (Robert D. Battin & K. Subramanian, March/April 2001). With offshore business analysis, the liaison’s role is to communicate at your site in situations where it is difficult for the offshore team to do so. Examples include tracking down a subject matter expert that is always in a meeting, finding the answer to a question that may require a certain amount of back-and-forth discussion, or even something as simple as talking to a customer when the time zones don't quite match up with the offshore team.

Most software projects these days are completed in multiple iterations. This means that even if the offshore team travels at the beginning of the project, there will be a lot of requirements that are left for later iterations. It's not cost-effective or efficient for the offshore team to travel at the beginning of each iteration. But the local liaison can add value to their role by performing high-level business and requirements analysis and documentation during those iterations.

If you’re concerned that assigning a high-cost local person to the project adds overhead, keep in mind that it only needs to be a part-time assignment, especially if the project is small. For larger teams, our experience shows that there is plenty of work to be distributed among both offshore and local team members, and a high ratio of offshore to local team members provides an attractive cost structure.

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