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.

It comes along with several advantages, some of which are listed below:

1. Cost reduction
   
   • Using offshore resources help reduce cost by 30%
   • Improving productivity by using reusable digital assets driving about 30% of reuse
   • Optimum utilization of resources through engagement models like Retainer, FTE, T&M, fixed price giving flexibility to customers
2. Improves customer experience
   • Global teams help in addressing the issues on time through local and offshore presence via dedicated customer experience teams
   • Digitized processes and tools help build visibility and transparency ensuring prioritization and responsiveness
   • Real time dashboard captures results of campaigns
3. Speed to market
   • Global delivery models and teams help in reducing the turn-around time and improves the speed to market
   • Content Management System framework, reusable platforms and tools help in reducing the cycle time
   • Multi skill workforce under one umbrella helps leverage the competency and efficiency

 

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:

• How do you ensure requirements are captured correctly?
• How do you ensure seamless risk management and business continuity?
• How do you cater to infrastructure requirements?
• How do you ensure that speed and response rate of delivering applications and tasks is maintained?
• How do you ensure that the quality, security, compliance, etc. is well taken care of?

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 six pillars for a great global delivery model

Engagement Model

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:

1. Fixed price
2. Time & material with SLAs
3. Retainer-based model with SLAs

Global delivery processes

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 CMMI^SM 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:

• Integrating the tools and simplifying
• Improving the efficiency and productivity for reducing errors
• Collaborating between globally distributed teams

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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