Think Locally, Act Globally

You need someone to understand your needs, your industry and your company culture.

You need application development projects delivered on time, on budget, and with top quality – and you may need ongoing support for those applications.

And to stay competitive, you need all this at a lower price, yet with sufficient interactivity and a full, ongoing spectrum of communications.

These are exactly the requirements met by CIBER’s Global Distributed Delivery solutions. CIBER provides clients with the optimal mix of resources–onsite, onshore and offshore—necessary to enable them to achieve and exceed their business objectives. Beyond where the work is performed and what it costs, CIBER’s methodology guides critical thinking around other important business factors, including business risk, knowledge transfer, operational complexity, methodologies and skills availability.

What is the right mix of CIBER and client resources on a particular engagement? How do you balance the cost of resources and the complexity of managing a diverse and distributed team? These are some of the challenges met by CIBER’s Optimized Delivery Model™ (ODM) approach, which strives to minimize resource costs and maximize delivery efficacy and quality. The approach comprises a series of steps designed to:

• Profile the customer’s business drivers and capabilities
• Create alternative resource scenarios
• Formalize governance around delivering the work

The output of these efforts is a recommended delivery model optimized to balance your resource costs with the risks and constraints of distributed delivery teams.

The Global Sourcing Challenge: Expressing the Requirements
CIBER has crafted its solution based on input from many experts, as well as a clear vision of what organizations need to achieve IT and business success in today's global environment.

According to Joe Morone, CIBER’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Solutions, companies often struggle with the need to create a business requirements document—the cornerstone of an effective outsourcing engagement. Morone notes that it is this step, rather than technological issues, that presents the greatest challenge in any IT effort. But that's even more true when engaging global resources for outsourcing. "It is imperative that enterprises understand the nature of effective business requirements in developing, implementing, integrating and managing applications—especially in an offshore model," says Morone.

Failing to fully articulate business requirements is one of the most common mistakes organizations make in any engagement. Certainly, the necessary contents of a requirements document can sometimes be unclear. "Experienced consultants can help an organization develop a thorough business requirements document that becomes the driver to build, integrate and support mission critical applications," says Morone.

"Invest time and money in developing good business requirements, communicating them cross-functionally, and then you’re in the game," he adds.

The Offshore Options
Certainly, offshore application outsourcing is not new. Indeed, enterprises and external service providers have long been involved in such relationships. However, offshore outsourcing is increasingly viewed as a strategic choice that can significantly reduce costs and support a focus on core competencies. "The strongest driver is certainly the possibility of cutting costs, especially with the expanded capability of overseas resources," say Morone.

And offshoring is not just for large companies any more. As outsourcing options have grown and strategies have become more mature, it’s easier now for small- and mid-size businesses to take advantage of the cost savings and efficiencies, which were previously thought to be only available to large firms.

Morone says the application outsourcing market now includes a broad range of services. Understanding key trends and drivers shaping this market will help enterprises better plan, implement and refine their sourcing strategies. According to Morone, typical engagements that involve offshore resources can be broken down into four steps:

• Plan
• Architect
• Build
• Deploy and Manage

Significantly, Morone does not find overseas resources comprising more than 20 percent of total head count prior to the "labor intensive" build and deploy phase. Understanding when and how to apply resources, and having the right local and overseas components, is key.

The CIBER Solution
Some enterprises are afraid to use global delivery for full lifecycle IT project management. In part, the fear is justified because global sourcing has been oversold, and the cost savings have sometimes been exaggerated. And, for the uninitiated, there are risks relative to schedule, cost, and results.

"In the past, most of those using offshore resources have been focused on mature applications rather than building new applications from the ground up," says Morone. “But building new applications from the ground up requires a whole host of additional competencies and considerations. There is a big difference between simply leveraging offshore resources for specific point tasks and leveraging offshore resources for the full lifecycle of applications," he explains.

Offshore resources can be transactional—that is, used merely for very specific tasks. Or they can be transformational—that is, partners who participate in the full application lifecycle and bring their skills and expertise to the table to ensure a successful project, not just a successful task.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” - Alan Lakein
“The successful engagements are those where all parties work in a partnership approach,” added Morone. That's because the transactional view of outsourcing is focused on end results, and not on what’s needed to achieve those end results. Many firms dive in too quickly, without understanding the larger picture, and then are disappointed when project benefits appear too slowly or not at all.

So where is the disconnect? Usually around establishing requirements and updating requirements as the project proceeds. "It is very important to understand the nature of the project being developed and managed, rather than proceeding to simply construct a distributed development environment," says Morone.

To fully understand the project and develop the most effective business requirements, you must ask difficult questions. What is the desired end result? How will you measure success? What metrics are most important? What is your organization’s tolerance for risk? What roles and responsibilities will your firm manage, and which will you expect the outsourcer to manage? Don’t expect the outsourcing agency to work without your commitment to review deliverables, make decisions, or provide subject matter experts.

Developing answers to these and similar questions is critical to developing workable business requirements, and this is what CIBER’s Global Distributed Delivery solution helps you determine. The key, says Morone, is to have help from an organization with the ability to look at requirements from inside—with a thorough understanding of your needs and your culture, as well as a thorough understanding of the nuances of successful outsourcing engagements.

"It's the only way to elicit accurate and complete business requirements," says Morone. "Organizations will be successfully leveraging global resources—it’s an irreversible trend—but it won't work unless tasks are properly categorized and assigned.

It can be tempting to consider all outsourcing vendors equal and focus just on price, but there are many factors to consider, and most importantly among those is the vendor’s willingness to partner with you and develop effective business requirements. And proper requirements are critical to the success of the project.

Says Morone, “Long after the project is complete, you’ll forget the $10,000 you may have saved by going to a cheaper, more transactional vendor who didn’t focus on building good business requirements. But you will remember the overall experience—skills, capabilities, responsiveness, attention to detail, flexibility in dealing with the unexpected, and—most importantly—results.”

About CIBER, Inc.

CIBER, Inc. (NYSE: CBR) is a leading international system integration consultancy with superior value-priced services for both private and public sector clients. CIBER’s services are offered on a project- or strategic- staffing basis, in both custom and enterprise resource planning (ERP) package environments, and across all technology platforms, operating systems and infrastructures.
What makes CIBER different? Experienced ISO-certified local teams working from 60 U.S. offices can leverage the economic advantages of global sourcing.

Founded in 1974, the company’s consultants now serve client businesses from more than 80 offices worldwide. With 8,000 employees and annual revenue of nearly $1 billion, CIBER builds, integrates and supports clients’ mission-critical applications and systems, providing full life-cycle support of IT investments.

For more information, see us on the web at www.ciber.com or call us at 1-800-242-3799