The Agile Nearshore: Best Fits for Efficiency and Innovation
Maximizing Agile Performance: Why Nearshore Teams are the Key to Efficiency and Innovation
You don’t need me to tell you that speed matters in business. But let’s consider some ways, courtesy of Jay Baer’s Time to Win study:
Around 2/3 (64%) of surveyed customers list speed/responsiveness to be as important as price
More than half (52%) hired a provider because they were the first to respond (even if not the cheapest)
Customers indicated they’d pay 19% more for immediate service
85% list speed/responsiveness as key to their brand loyalty
82% expect email replies within 24 hours
Gen Z are the most likely of surveyed generations to feel respected when a company responds quickly
Speed is key across industries, and a major driver in so-called pay for performance or value-based offerings, like healthcare. People pay more to skip lines, from airports to border crossings, theme parks to services.
And in the world of technology, change is constant. With AI, for example, nearly anything you write, buy, or learn is outdated in a year’s time, with new plateaus coming every 1.5–2 years.
In recruiting, this is also true: strong candidates go fast, and to be successful, you need to know when to move on talent while still applying the necessary evaluation rigor.
In the world of software development, more than 71% of companies already use the Agile methodology in some form, where quickness and adaptability are king.
Here I want to consider speed, specifically in terms of the Agile approach, as it relates to staffing.
Agile is More Than a Buzzword
Today it seems like you hear the word “agile” or “agility” applied to just about everything.
Here I mean the Agile software development methodology, created in response to the rigidity of earlier approaches, like Waterfall. There are greater reasons for its popularity, and broader applications.
The Agile Manifesto created back in 2001, stresses four key values:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
It’s a reaction to paralysis by analysis, to scope creeping larger and larger between releases, to documentation to an extent that stifles execution.
We can all appreciate this need for speed. The Agile approach transformed project management and development (and business as a whole) with tools that enable ever-faster development (and DevOps concepts like continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD).
These principles are built around speed and increasing customer satisfaction, and though there are ways of managing an agile methodology with outsourcing (companies have been wrestling with that for decades), the fact is they can be difficult to merge.
Outsourcing in an Agile World
There are undeniable benefits to offshore recruiting: a far larger talent pool at a better price than onshore, and follow the sun coverage, meaning you always have team members at the helm when you need them, day and night.
But with Agile, where close, daily check-ins via Scrum meeting are key, and informal, regular communication are central to success, outsourcing poses several difficulties, such as:
Time zone: The power of follow the sun is a drawback with Agile approaches, as workers must adjust shifts to manage any moments of real-time communication
Language: With communication the key to the pace and adaptability of Agile, close teamwork is paramount, and language barriers can make this difficult
Documentation: Agile backgrounds documentation in favor of real-time collaboration, but this also makes hand-offs across time zones and work shifts more difficult
Training: Again, if your face-to-face time is limited to adjusted schedule overlaps, less-experienced developers may struggle to get up to speed
Stakeholder feedback: Agile involves customer collaboration as well as team, and once again this can be more challenging due to language, culture, and time zone barriers with offshore teams
Offshore recruiting has long been necessary for many organizations, as they grapple with finite resources and the availability of workers.
But it doesn’t need to be a choice between a true Agile approach or outsourcing. In my experience, this is where nearshore recruiting can truly shine.
Finding Nearshore Agility
Nearshore recruiting solutions can help businesses eager for better efficiency and innovation capitalize on an Agile approach, while still finding quality team members at a very affordable price. By looking to nations like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, American businesses can walk a middle path.
Agile nearshore outsourcing provides benefits such as:
Real-Time Collaboration
Quality communication is at the heart of Agile, and a key for the accelerating speed of businesses worldwide. Nearshore solutions help businesses address this by partnering team members in the same, or very close time zones, enabling Scrums, real time feedback, and quicker iterations.
Training and onboarding can also be done in real time, helping to reduce unnecessary delays triggered by physical distance.
Ready Understanding
Partner nations that are closer together typically have greater cultural affinity, with far greater language overlap, making teams easier to form. Teamwork is fundamental to an Agile approach, and nearshore and onshore teams mesh much more quickly.
Adaptability
We all must be adaptable in today’s tech landscape, and the ability to quickly respond to change is one reason the Agile approach has caught fire.
Nearshore and onshore blended teams are ready for this change, such as sudden shifts in requirements, new stakeholder feedback, added training, or even pair programming, eliminating the delays that hamper offshore members trying to work in an Agile or hybrid framework.
Innovation
Outsourcing brings real benefits in the right situations, and unique perspectives.
But for an Agile approach, the efficiency in nearshore teams comes from closer relationships that are formed more easily, as discussed. Interaction is the heart of Agile, and this back-and-forth can bring both benefits together, sparking the added perk of innovation in your outsourcing.
Rather than working in silos, current technologies enable remote, blended teams to come together, reaching a deeper understanding of a client’s needs and challenges, and finding unique solutions to problems that they may have been unable to identify alone.
I find the differences nearshore team members bring together in real time often inspire new solutions to old problems.
And these are just some of the benefits of nearshore outsourcing.
Conclusion
Speed and adaptability are increasingly essential to maintain customer satisfaction in today’s markets, and the Agile methodology is surging in popularity as it was built for precisely these things.
But in reality, few teams are the onshore, onsite groups envisioned at the start of the movement. And while companies have long been managing to make do with distributed, offshore and onshore teams, there are alternatives.
If your business is like most and incorporates Agile in some capacity, and is also considering nearshore vs offshore recruiting, consider nearshore blended agile teams as the most practical solution.
With the right nearshore partner, you can extend your in-house teams seamlessly, rapidly, and align them with Agile principles from the start, forming blended teams capable of delivering rapid, quality results.
In the end, this may be the only way to not only keep up, but actually get ahead in this accelerating reality.