Over the past years Sakshay has identified, mostly the hard way, the following bottlenecks to creating successful offshore development partnerships and delivery of projects.

Scope and cost increase
The leading reason for scope and the ensuring cost increase, is incorrect or unclear estimations

Non-centralised communication
Communication which gets distributed among several stake holders across a project is perfect recipe for a failed project

Decreased visibility in project status
Lack of enough communication, and little or no visibility into project development till late stages of the project, can be quite frustrating and even disastrous

Lack of owners
Lack of ownership from either of the parties involved; associated with this is the lack of technical expertise in-house

Quality of delivery
Poor quality control practices

Trust
Need anything be said about this?

Solutions for overcoming challenges offered in outsourcing

Estimation process and communicating assumptions
We've got a sound process in place (which are evolving continuously as we learn the hard way) for most of our activities, specifically the Content Management implementation process. We communicate assumptions clearly and in as much detail as possible

Use of a Project Collaboration tool:
We use Basecamp as our primary Project Collaboration tool. It helps us centralise communication across all stakeholders in the project. Often, Eventum is employed for Bug tracking. We're continuously evaluating other project management and collaboration tools for further improving our Project management practices. Using customers' project tools is always a welcome option.

Detailing project deliverables
Using Basecamp allows us to create detailed Milestones and To-Do lists, thus giving visibility and predictability to the project deliveries

Ownership and escalation model
Each project has a Project Manager defined, with an escalation model in place. Sakshay is organised into independent profitable units, with each unit having a Group Manager. We expect our customers to have a Project Manager from their end.

Code in public space
Some of our code is in the public domain, released under GPL for the benefit of the community. These projects and the code can be reviewed to measure the quality of our code.

Democratic practices
Sakshay is a furiously democratic company, with all decisions on the direction of the company directed through discussions, negotiations and consensus (or voting in case a consensus cannot be arrived at, and in case a decision cannot be deferred to a later date) among the core-committee members, who represent different profitable business units at Sakshay. All of us would have to be really bad people to to be a bad company to deal with. We surely make mistakes, which can be interpreted in many ways. We accept our mistakes, and incorporate the learning.