Study of maintenance project manpower dynamics in Indian software outsourcing industry

Abstract

Purpose The paper aims to study manpower dynamics at offshore and onsite location for maintenance project, which are transferred to offshore location in a phase-wise manner. The purpose of the paper is to find good values of onsite–offshore team strength, the number of hours of communication between onsite and offshore teams for smooth transfer of software maintenance project to offshore location. Design/methodology/approach This study uses system dynamics simulation approach to study manpower allocation at onsite and offshore locations to transfer the maintenance work to offshore location in a gradual manner. The authors consulted 13 experts from Indian software outsourcing industry during the model construction and validation. Findings The simulation results show that the complexity of maintenance project has an insignificant effect on offshore migration. The maintenance work transfer should start with initial onsite team strength higher than that of required for ticket solving and project. The initial offshore team strength should be based on training capacity available at the onsite location. The higher attrition rate at an offshore is detrimental for offshore migration. Research limitations/implications The implication of the study is in the development of a broad framework of software maintenance work transfer to offshore locations for Indian software outsourcing projects. As the study is based on expert opinion in the context of India, it cannot be generalized for outsourcing scenarios elsewhere. Practical implications The software project manager can use the findings to get more insight into maintenance project offshore migration and divide the software team between onsite and offshore location. Originality/value The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the manpower composition at onsite and offshore locations for software maintenance project during the migration phase.

A study of business knowledge requirements for software projects

“…The literature discusses the importance of business knowledge in software development (Tiwana, 2004a(Tiwana, , 2004bHaamann and Basten, 2019) and knowledge transfer issues in global software development (Krancher and Dibbern, 2020). Except for Mishra and Mahanty (2019), there is no effort to find out the requirement of various kinds of business knowledge for different projects. We tried to address the limitation of their study to identify the requirements of technology and business knowledge for carrying out different types of outsourcing software projects in the context of India with the help of a detailed questionnaire study among software practitioners.…”

Application of fuzzy TOPSIS framework for selecting complex project in a case company

“…Multi-criteria project selection based on uncertainty and risk are studied too (Jafarzadeh et al, 2018;Davoudabadi et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2020;Pramanik et al, 2020;Dandage et al, 2021). In the case of the complex Application of fuzzy TOPSIS framework project selection method, it is essential to find out the factors that affect projects, complexity (Dobrovolskiene and Tamosiuniene, 2016;Floyd et al, 2017;Park et al, 2018;Mishra and Mahanty, 2019). It is often cumbersome and uncertain to determine the weight of the factors that are responsible for project complexities.…”

Opinion Analysis of Software Developers Working Onsite on Public Sector Software Projects: An Exploratory Study

“…Onsite outsourcing has been mostly researched and discussed in connection and as a delivery model of offshore outsourcing and global software development. The common research topics in this area with respect to onsite employees and teams are mostly focusing on knowledge sharing and codification [10][11][12][13][14][15], work design [16,17], project cost, project schedule, project cost [18,19] and cultural differences [20]. Betz, Oberweis and Stephan [10] discuss the best practices of knowledge transfer in offshore outsourcing and globally distributed projects, by considering both onsite and offshore project teams.…”

“…Mishra and Sinha [16], by proposing a new metric named as Onsite-Ratio and examining the interrelationships between the elements of work design, project integration challenges, and project performance conclude that managers can actively lower integration glitches by increasing the levels of onsite ratio in software development projects. In a different research, Mishra and Mahanty [17] study manpower dynamics with the purpose of finding good values of onsite-offshore team strength and the number of hours of communication between onsite and offshore teams for smooth transfer of project. Their findings show that the project of work transfer should start with initial onsite team strength higher than that of required.…”