The Other Shore of Offshoring : Current and Future Projects at a Global Delivery Center

Abstract: This thesis studies communication and cooperation between an offshore outsourcing center in China, its Swedish counterpart and their common Swedish customer. This is done from the view point of the offshore outsourcing center, with the aim to suggest improvements for current and future projects for the Swedish customer. The study focuses on two parts: the ability of the offshore outsourcing center to overcome the general challenges in offshoring and the specific difficulties that its teams are facing when performing work for the Swedish customer. The research has been conducted mainly using primary data gathered during interviews, analysis of internal documents and participant observation. The findings consists of several success factors that contribute to the offshore outsourcing center’s ability to overcome the challenges of offshoring, as well as a list of difficulties that it is facing when starting up new projects and running existing ones. Each success factor comes with recommendations on how it can be maintained and each difficulty comes with recommendations on how it can be reduced or removed.