Author: Sonu Rathore | Categories: Digital Marketing, Marketing Automation, Online Marketing
Global Delivery Model in the IT Industry is a common phenomenon. Today, marketers are facing a tough challenge while supporting the infrastructure and website across the globe through a single team. As websites and digital assets are the face of a company, it is super important that websites are maintained optimally so that they are up and running and a better customer experience is ensured.
This can be achieved by ‘Follow the Sun Model’ approach, which was adopted by the IT industry long ago and is still one of the best approaches to support globally distributed teams, customers, and users.
Gartner defines a global delivery model as
“the optimum combination of processes, end-to-end methodologies and quality procedures, with high-quality skills and resources available internally or externally, in requisite quantities, on a global basis, that enables organizations to maximize the quality of their solutions while minimizing the overall cost and delivery time of their IT services.”
It comes along with several advantages, some of which are listed below:
Though the above model works well in the IT industry, complexity increases with the marketing teams where customer experience needs to be enhanced by the hour. This needs tight integration between the IT infrastructure, marketing, creative and design teams, architects, developers, analytics teams, and others. Naturally, the challenges are multi fold and can be summed up as:
To answer the above questions, the Global Delivery Model has 6 pillars-
Engagement Model – Defining the structure and execution mode
Processes – Defining processes for distributed environment to ensure repeatability, quality and timeliness
Tools – Ensuring that the right set of tools are used to give visibility to the engagement
People – Right skill sets are mapped via the competency driven model
Infrastructure– Connectivity, modes and methods of communication play an important role in global teams
Governance – Finally reviews at different levels enable continual improvement bringing in innovation
Let us take a deep dive into each of these areas. This blog is a part of the multi-blog series on the importance of global delivery model in the digital world and in this blog we shall highlight the engagement model, processes & tools. The rest will be focused on in our subsequent blog.
The first step towards a great global delivery model is defining the engagement model. This allows building flexibility.
The following engagement models are the most preferred:
Model |
When to use? |
How it works? |
Fixed price |
Budget/cost is fixed and is used when requirements are at least 80% known. Useful in giving fixed cost with fixed timeline with a given scope. |
Collaborative participation from clients and stakeholders to gather requirements, clarify scope, and make prompt decisions. |
Time & material |
Expected modification in scope. Projects with evolving requirements and undocumented processes.
High dependency on stakeholders for decision making and external factors.
|
This model uses the capacity building method and takes into consideration the volume, complexity of work, and technology in use. This model allows customers to look for specialized teams and have booked hours for work. Costing is arrived through real time usage of hours spent by teams. |
Retainer-based |
Fixed amount of hours and assurance of a fixed team. |
This model is useful for long term contracts where knowledge retention is important. This model allows customers to work with specific named teams on optimized hours with a complete visibility of productivity. |
Engagement models are successful with the right set of processes. The below diagram depicts the important aspects for an engagement that includes global program management, risk management, communication management, and planning and oversight.
In a digital marketing agency working with content management systems and mobility, it is important that the time to market is reduced. Agile Scrum Methodologies are the most apt processes for today’s digital projects. The methodology enables global teams to co-develop on common platforms.
At edynamic, we use the best practices of CMMISM for development with the Agile Scrum Model. Below is an illustration of that:
Automation and using the right tools is the only way to bring speed and consistency in delivering applications. There are a variety of tools which can be used for development, some are enlisted below.
Marketing in the digital world requires integration with tools and an ability to collect data and derive insights. The key elements include:
Automation Suites
Building automation suites from development to testing and deployment enables new and faster feature releases on B2B or B2C platforms. Today, when customers are looking for change and results in minutes, it has become important that this demand is effectively met. To bridge this gap, some platforms are indeed releasing features every minute prompting the entire delivery model to work in an automated mode.
That’s all for this part. Keep watching this space for the next part of this series.
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Sonu has more than 24 years of industry experience in the field of IT/ITES, Consulting in various Fortune 50 companies.