* Diversity. Diversity in terms of bringing individual contributor with different background into the team often means a tremendous increase in productivity. A healthy portion of resources with different education, practical background, and way of operating could bring a fresh breath of air in stagnating organization. Also “diversifying” your portfolio of resources might help a great deal to deal with micro factors affecting employment / recruitment landscape of a specific geography.
- You mean you can’t find a diversity here in the US? Have you looked out your office window lately? And you really think a bunch of developers in cubes thousands of miles away are somehow going to help out your stagnant organization?

* Education. In countries such as India, Russia, China you find many people who value education to much higher degree than we do in the states. On one of my teams from St. Petersburg a majority of developers had at least MS and over 40% had Ph.D. That including QA engineers! Needless to say the brain power of the team was absolutely amazing.
- There is no lack of brain power here in the US. Remember that the US leads the world in computer technology. The problem for you is, that people with brain power don’t want to work for you because there are better employment options here in the US. Why work for a guy who just views them as a “resource” instead of a knowledge worker.

* Work Ethics. That doesn’t go across all geographies and companies, but fortunately you still can find outsourcing organizations with resources who’s work ethics are far superior to what you find for example in corporate America.
- You probably have experienced a poor work ethic amongst your workers but this is just poor management. Your workers are probably bummed that you view them as an interchangeable cog that be easily replaced with another cog thousands of miles away. You simply need to update your skills on how to deal with a highly skilled workforce and the work ethic issue will disappear.

* Talent Pool. Some outsourcing organizations instead of typical “selling mediocrity in bulk” build their team with top notch experts and people with exceptionally high IQ. Building such a team, no matter in which area of the world takes very long time.
- Yea, hint, this is what your job should be, building your team with top notch experts. Not trooping all over the world trying to find the cheapest coder in some st peterberg backalley.

* Processes. Getting process right is time consuming and costly. When ISO or CMM processes are a requirement it’s often much easier to build relationship with a subcontractor who already has those in place.
- The process includes other parts of the business as well, particular the product development group. Are you going to offshore those people as well? If not, then you still need to build the processes between these groups.

* Project Management. Project and program management is often something that a small software organization can not afford (or more often VPE can’t sell his execs / team on the need for it). Many, especially Indian vendors have that in perfect shape.
- I’ve worked on a number of projects with no formal project management. It can be done with the right process. If you tighten the feedback loop between the various stakeholders, you’re need for project management is considerably reduced.

* Cost. While I do not believe that offshore guarantees cost savings I do believe that there is a huge potential there especially with careful execution of multi-sourcing or/and micro-sourcing strategies.
- Problem is, how do you know what offshoring ultimately costs your business? How do you estimate the long-term damage from not being able to respond quickly to changing market conditions, a demotivated workforce, etc.