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Offshoring as a theoretical concept clearly relates to the process of sending work overseas, however the majority of the research on offshoring has focused the decision stage rather than the complete lifecycle. This paper is based on longitudinal case studies of two Global Fortune 500 companies which are sending work from several of their globally dispersed business units to their R&D centers in China & India. A generic process of distributing work globally; from decision to transfer and operational governance is described. Studying the decisions translated into practice, aspects such as managerial intentionality, path dependence, and the need for strategic alignment are highlighted. Our results show that these companies consider offshoring as an ongoing iterative process of managing complex work in a global organization, where one transfer project may result in more functions being transferred. This paper develops the foundations of a process framework to support sustainable offshoring practice.

Global product development has become integral to the way enterprises work today. The drivers for distribution work to global locations such India and China began with a focus on the significant cost differentials when compared to executing the work in western countries (Mao et al. 2008). Since then, the availability of talent (Lewin et al, 2009; Quelin & Duhamel, 2003) and accessibility of markets (Goldbrunner et al, 2006; Mao et al. 2008) have become equally important motivators.

The use of offshoring adds an additional layer of complexity to the already complex product development governance processes that companies use. Current literature discuss the offshoring or outsourcing decision (Levina & Su, 2008), describing organizational objectives for offshoring (Quelin & Duhamel, 2003; Lewin et al, 2009), guidelines for location choices (Cohen et al, 2009), deciding what functions to send offshore (Contractor et al, 2010) coupled with core competencies, as well as risks associated with offshoring (Lewin and Peeters, 2006; Aron & Singh, 2005). The offshoring process itself can be framed in terms of the decision to send functions (components, products, or services) overseas, progressing to planning and executing a transfer and iterating through the governance associated with operations. Since the vast majority of the literature focus on the decision stage of the offshoring process, or the governance perspective on existing globally distributed teams, there is still a need for understanding the process of transferring components and whole products. This papers aims to shed further light on that gap by describing the actual process of executing a successful transfer.

 The empirical foundation of this paper is a single in-depth case study of a new product development organization being established in China. We used an inductive approach that relied on qualitative and archival data to truly understand the dynamics of managing the offshoring of complex products and uncover the underlying mechanisms and structures. Given the paucity of literature and experience reports on transfers, an exploratory approach for collecting qualitative data was used. The primary source of data collection in this paper was interviews with key stakeholders within the projects at the general management and project management levels. We interviewed 15 managers from the Swedish and Chinese centres, and analysed archival data to gain a deeper understanding into both the sending and receiving side.

 The case enterprise, called Eurosoft, has a rich history of outsourcing to other suppliers, and was beginning to establish its presence in China. A strategic decision was taken by senior leadership to create an offshore organization in China that would assume complete ownership of one of their flagship products. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of having the same organizational structure replicated on the European and Chinese sites, Eurosoft chose to establish a product-centred organization on the China side. This paper will give insight to the context of transferring entire product responsibility for a mature product. While the strategies and motivations of distributing work across the product development life cycle have been debated in the literature, the question remains – how do you implement it?

 The case highlighted the key challenges that organizations face when handing an offshoring scenario. Even though Eurosoft Swedish centre was transitioning work to a sister organization within the larger Eurosoft enterprise, they faced hurdles with respect to establishing a common framework for carrying out the product transfer; communicating across cultural and national boundaries; having the receiving team demonstrate and feel comfortable with their competence; and dealing with the mismatch of organizational priorities in the two organizations. Eurosoft found that it was challenging to adhere to the transfer model when key resources from the sending side were often also focused on development projects unrelated to the transfer. When those projects ran into problems, the mentors from the sending side were unavailable to the receiving side. This introduces variability in the transfer process. While everyone recognized the importance of defining and locking the scope of the transfer, they found that scope creep occurred because a strategic roadmap was not articulated to the whole team. Furthermore, the number of interdependencies within a given product and between the products in the portfolio made it difficult to get consensus on the scope. The challenges that emerged in the case are consistent with that faced by project managers studied by Lacity and Rottman (2008). While none of these challenges in and of themselves are unique, the combination of the challenges in the context of a transfer project provides useful insights to both theory and practice.

 Based on the study, our recommendations to the practicing manager are to:

-          Establish a standard transfer model that clarifies transfer scope up front, and develop a governance mechanism to assess progress.

-          Ensure communication modes and interface mechanisms are articulated and agreed upon, and that training has been provided to address soft issues such as culture.

-          Provide dedicated resources to ensure effective knowledge transfer to the receiving team

-          Develop competencies in the receiving team across the four areas of technical, product governance, ways of working, and cultural commonality.

Offshoring of knowledge-intensive work is a relatively new phenomenon wherein organizations choose to distribute segments of their value chain ranging from testing, to product development and innovation across geographical and organizational boundaries. Moving work from one location to another creates new challenges for the organization as the complexity of the processes and number of organizational interfaces increases. This paper uses three case studies to explore the paradoxes and underlying tensions found in the practice of globally distributed development. The study demonstrates how multiple levels of analysis can be applied to resolve the tensions and trade-offs in globally distributed work.

Offshoring is an emerging trend where companies choose to globally distribute segments of the value chain ranging from production and testing, to product development and innovation. Offshoring of activities that were previously performed at home base create new challenges for the industry, as the complexity of both the process as well as the organizational interfaces increase. Three case studies are used to explore the paradoxes found in the practice of globally distributed development. We discuss the need for opposition, spatial and temporal separation, and synthesis to explain and resolve the tensions and trade-offs in globally distributed development that is visible in these case studies.

In the current competitive environment, the question is no longer whether or not to go offshore, but in determining what should be offshored and how it should be offshored, while keeping the value proposition for the organization as a whole coherent. The decision to offshore work to locations such as India and China may often be initially driven by the need to leverage the cost differentials when compared to western sites, but evolve to focus on other key value levers such as access to talent and time to market. Given that globalization of product development projects is an organizational reality today, in order to remain competitive, organizations have to develop capabilities to successfully transition to this new way of working. Despite the prevalence of offshoring in large multi-nationals, there is limited understanding of the dynamics of standing up new sites. In this paper, we focus on identifying some of the key capabilities that organizations need to effectively offshore work, through a case study of the transfer of a product from the European site of large-multinational called Eurosoft to one of their Chinese sites. Starting with their strategic decision to offshore the development of the product, we study the critical actions undertaken as part of the transfer process and illustrate four types of organizational capabilities- technology (ability to understand and execute the project); process & tools (ways of working both within the organization and with clients); relationship management (ability to govern at both the project-level and at the relationship level); and knowledge management (ability to grow human capital, institutionalize best practices, and codify learning).

Lean and Innovation have both been touted as transformational strategies that are essential to long term survival of organizations. The question of whether the two constructs can be used simultaneously remains unanswered. This paper is the first step at deriving a theory of lean systems of innovation that combines the notions of lean transformation with that of innovation. The descriptive understanding of Rockwell Collins developed in this paper, draws on publicly available material to support the identifications of the key elements of a strategic system of innovation. Our analysis highlighted the successful use of technology scanning, internal R&D, and open innovation at Rockwell Collins. These approaches were supported by the existence of a shared value proposition, a strong organizational culture that recognized and rewarded innovation, and the requisite organizational infrastructure.

Software is one of the core elements that drive the modern economy, with visible use in areas such as personal computing, telecommunications and banking, and background use in areas such as aircraft traffic management, nuclear power generation, and automotive control systems. Organizations that build software are unique in that they span industrial domains, and at their core of what they do is codifying human knowledge. When we talk about software organizations, we think of organizations that work in the three broad areas of shrink wrapped application software, software-intensive systems, or software services.  By shrink wrapped application software, we refer to the software that one can buy in a retail store for use on his or her computer. Software-intensive systems are part of a larger system such as air traffic management, and software services focus on making software work for other organizations. This thesis uses studies of eight software organizations to understand how these organizations are able to identify changes to their environment, and create the required capabilities to meet those changes – in other words, how these organizations gain enterprise agility.

To understand enterprise agility, we ask three simple questions, namely how does the organization improve what it currently does? What does the organization do? and Who does the work that the organization chooses to do? By answering each of these questions in the context of software organizations, we identify the three mechanisms of Software Process Improvement (SPI), Creating Systems of Innovation (CSI), and Leveraging Globally Available Capabilities (LGAC). These three mechanisms are interconnected and interdependent. By creating rich descriptions of how these mechanisms are implemented in the organizations that we studied in the thesis, we are able to build confidence that these mechanisms are an accurate representation of the approaches that organizations use. In addition to identifying the mechanisms, by analyzing across the cases, we identify the four organizational enablers of stakeholder alignment, employee empowerment, group & organizational learning, and governance.

Organizations can create enterprise agility by ensuring the presence of the four organizational enablers and leveraging some combination of the three mechanisms. While it is possible for the organization to create enterprise agility in the absence of these mechanisms, we believe that the agility generated is not sustainable. To survive in the tough economic conditions of today, software organizations need to be aware of, and actively manage both the enablers and the mechanisms for sustained success. This thesis is a first step in finding more effective ways to manage software organizations as a whole, rather than as a collection of individual projects. It presents a philosophy of thinking about software organizations that addresses the uniqueness of these organizations while at the same time leveraging best practices and thought leadership from the disciplines of software engineering, quality,  knowledge management, strategy, organizational theory, and stakeholder theory.

Two strategies that have significantly changed the way we conventionally think about managing software development and sustainment are the family of development approaches collectively referred to as agile methods, and the distribution of development efforts on a global scale. When you combine the two strategies, organizations have to address not only the technical challenges that arise from introducing new ways of working, but more importantly have to manage the 'soft' factors that if ignored lead to hard challenges. Using two case studies of distributed agile software development in India we illustrate the areas that organizations need to be aware of when transitioning work to India. The key issues that we emphasize are the need to recruit and retain personnel; the importance of teaching, mentoring and coaching; the need to manage customer expectations; the criticality of well-articulated senior leadership vision and commitment; and the reality of operating in a heterogeneous process environment.

The preliminary argument used by most organizations that choose to source their software from other organizations is the perceived cost savings. The nature of the relationship between the customer and supplier has to necessarily evolve in order for it to remain mutually beneficial over the long run, i.e., the 'arms-length' relationship becomes one of strategic partnering. Studying this evolving relationship requires a set of methods that capture the context within which these organizations exist, make explicit the gap (if any) between the actual and articulated nature of the relationship between the two organizations, and can be used to create some useful constructs for managing/ evolving the relationship. This paper illustrates how the paradigm of engaged scholarship has been applied to studying the EuroTel-IndiaCo relationshi

This annotated bibliography was developed as a means of creating a baseline of the state-of-the-art in vehicular software engineering. When we started the literature review for the project, the focus was on automotive software engineering, and as the review progressed, we realized the importance of expanding the scope to vehicular software engineering. Each of the three broad subsectors within the vehicular sector: automotive, trucks/buses, other specialty equipment; provide different insights into the challenges created by the use of software. Within the three sectors, the automotive sector has the highest volume, and at the same time is driven by the conventional pressures of lowering unit costs. The trucks/buses sector provides the greatest variation in software configurations since each buyer attempts to tailor the software components to their unique requirements. The specialty equipment sector has the least variance, but still leverages software to be a product differentiator.

Agile methods hold a significant promise to reduce cycle times and provide greater value to all key stakeholders involved in the software ecosystem. While these methods appear to be well suited for embedded systems development, their use has not become a widespread practice. In analyzing the state-of-the-art, as captured in published literature, we found that there are technical issues (requirements management, and testing), as well as organizational issues (process tailoring, knowledge sharing & transfer, culture change, and support infrastructure). In this paper, we build preliminary guidance for firms around these six areas and presented as a framework that will enable understanding the expected adoption trajectory.

Indian software organizations have long been early adopters of process improvement as a means of demonstrating organizational capabilities to their global client base. As a result, the development approaches in these organizations are often heavily plan-based, generating structures and processes that are appropriate to those approaches. Agile methods have forced a paradigm change in how we manage and execute software development. Adopting and sustaining agile methods requires organizations to not only manage the radical shift in the operational aspects of software development, but also the soft factors of organizational design such as vision, commitment, culture and training. Using three case studies of organizations that have adopted agile methods in India, we highlight the importance of senior leadership vision, mentoring, and personnel selection in creating an environment that will support successful agile adoption. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of building strong teams, managing customer expectations and driving process excellence as key for successful adoption. 

Adopting agile methods requires an understanding of both the mechanics and the dynamics of value creation in software organizations. From a mechanics perspective, successful agile adoption is about ensuring that project stakeholders are aligned toward a common project objective, employees have the ability to make decisions at the right level of abstraction, that there is effective project management, and an environment exists that supports individual and group learning. The dynamics of value creation require an understanding of organizational-level stakeholders and their value propositions, the development of an organizational learning system, and last but not least, an effective governance strategy. This paper uses the lessons learned a case study of GameDevCo to illustrate these organizational enablers for agile adoption.

Real-time systems are defined as systems in which the correctness of the system depends not only on the logical correctness of the computation, but also on the time at which the result is produced. Honeywell's choice of the Time Triggered Protocol (TTP) for a low cost avionics bus in 2001, exemplifies the industry trend to using Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components to implement real-time systems. The driving factors behind the trend are the introduction of SoC devices (Systems on a Chip) that contain processors, memory, network access, I/O interface, system and application software, and smart MEMS transducers which contain the sensing element, the signal conditioning logic and network access logic on a single silicon die. In this paper, we compare and contrast TTP, FlexRay and MIL-STD-1553 architectures in terms of the basic requirements for a systems bus, namely, network architecture, bus access, message formats, clock synchronization, fault tolerance, error detection and tool support.

The mythos surrounding the use of agile methods emphasizes improved customer satisfaction, developer morale, and end-product quality. nile the difficulty of adopting these methods is mentioned, it is often glossed over in the discussion. This paper presents an in-depth case study of agile methods adoption in a software product development firm. The choice of the firm as the unit of analysis enables the identification of organizational, social and technological challenges with respect to using agile methods. Using a mix of interviews, observation and archival data, the evolution of agile adoption within the firm is reconstructed The data analysis highlights the importance of the four areas of requirements management, scrum implementation, organizational learning, and verification & validation activities. 

Organizations involved in the design, development and sustainment of software systems have to manage the tension between creating new products and services, while at the same time maintaining their existing portfolio. This paper explores the sources of enterprise agility in software firms, wherein agility is defined as the ability of the organization to sense changes in its environment (both internal and external), and effectively respond to these changes. Using engaged scholarship as the overarching paradigm, we report on the findings of a process study that uses semi-structured interviews, observation, and archival firm & project information for data gathering, and grounded theory methods and comparative case analysis for data analysis and theory generation. The analysis highlights the importance of the four organizational enablers of: stakeholder alignment, employee empowerment, group & organizational learning, and governance mechanisms, as necessary but not sufficient precursors to obtaining enterprise agility. Furthermore, we provide illustrative case examples of the three mechanisms: Continuous Improvement, Creating Systems of Innovation, and Leveraging Globally available Capabilities, that software organizations use to gain enterprise agility

Openness and trust are key elements to sustaining any successful client-supplier relationship. When the relationship is transitioning from being arms-length to evolving into a true partnership, it is critical to establish a shared understanding of not only the current state, but also of the expected future state. A workshop organized and facilitated by a neutral party, with the senior leadership of both organizations provides an ideal means for articulating implicit assumptions and surfacing hidden challenges such that an actionable vision can be created. Using a recent workshop held with both EuroTel and IndiaCo, the key elements of the workshop are discussed, along with the lessons learned. Moreover, this workshop provides further insight into the mechanics of the evolution and governance of outsourcing relationships.

As the level of analysis grows from the individual, to the team or group, to the organization, the research methods applied used to evolve to address the uncertainties brought on by scope. Software organizations provide a scenario that blends intensive knowledge work with extremely high velocities. The nature of the problem being studied, significantly drives the choice of a variance research design or a process research design. The focus on enterprise agility in software organizations is more conducive to a process research design, and the study is theory generating in nature, we adopt a combination of grounded theoretic methods and comparative case analysis. In this paper, we share the research approach developed, and provide examples of how the study was designed, the data collected, reduced and analyzed. We conclude with a set of lessons learned that are applicable for engaging and collaborating with software organizations.