Identifying Early Warning Signs of Failures in Offshore Software Development Projects - A Delphi survey

ABSTRACT The distribution of IT activities around the world as a result of globalization has driven the growth of global IT outsourcing or IT offshoring. Software projects are increasingly sent from high-cost countries to low-cost offshore countries such as India, Russia etc. Because of the inherent complexities and uncertainties of software projects, they continue to experience poor performance problems. This paper discusses the concept of early warning signs (EWS) to improve project success rates, especially in the unique onshore-offshore project environment, which is exposed to higher project risks. This research employs a Delphi survey to identify and rank the most important EWSs of failures in offshore software development (OSD) projects. The survey panelists include 23 experts from the offshore client and vendor companies in Switzerland and India. The survey results are discussed and further steps to study the EWSs in an OSD project context are outlined. KEYWORDS Offshoring, Global software development, Project failure, Delphi survey, Early warning sign, Project management