Sunday, September 02, 2007

Aligning to client’s culture

I was reading a panel discussion abut BPO and outsourcing. The participants have stressed on the importance of aligning to the vendor and their culture for success of an outsourced project.

I have been working in this kind of industry since almost 6. Obviously I prefer and encourage offshoring with my clients, but not many clients have understood the importance of aligning with vendor’s culture. During one of the project, I remember our CEO told us, align to their culture, and then you can expect better results.

This is most forgotten part of such projects. The responsibility on both parties, vendor needs to understand the culture of client and client needs to understand vendors. I found some general outings and discussion about sports or general issues tend to break this barrier. One should not feel, the technical part is one and all. Off course it is important, but alignment helps to cover a long road.

The way we normally handle clients is that we restrict them to project related discussions and technical discussion. This is important to discuss these with client. But, my whole point is that we should not restrict only to this. Building the relationship is equally important.

After all, we all would like to be treated well and respected at our work by clients, is that right?

4 comments:

nileshkamble said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
nileshkamble said...

Santosh, I agree with you. We, as well as client, needs to understand the culture of each.

Beside this, I think there is shade of interpersonal skills, we can say it's style of person, who is responsible for holding discussion with client. These skills needs to be shared explicitly by getting the junior involved in such discussion,otherwise this is the thing which people will learn only through the experience over the course of time.

nileshkamble said...

Santosh, I agree with you. We, as well as client, needs to understand the culture of each.

Beside this, I think there is shade of interpersonal skills, we can say it's style of person, who is responsible for holding discussion with client. These skills needs to be shared explicitly by getting the junior involved in such discussion,otherwise this is the thing which people will learn only through the experience over the course of time.

Anonymous said...

good post.. but as far as i have heard... Out of your 6 years of experience you were onsite most of the time :) Still a good analysis.