Communication with Offshore: Useful Tools

Communication with Offshore: Useful Tools

While managing IT outsourcing, much of your communication with offshore status reviews, management reviews, milestone reviews, and so onwill be based on your communication plan, which will entail written communication as well as conference calls. When you have conference calls or chats, one of you would be doing it off hours because of the time difference, so whatever can be done in emails effectively should not be discussed on the call. Here are some communication tips and tools that I have found useful:

Emails: Use email for things that can be clearly written without needing conversation or lengthy detail. Appropriate topics are asking simple questions, planning a meeting, or approving something.

Chats: Chats tend to be more helpful for team members than managers. Team members can easily touch base with each other for a quick query, update or help when there is no need to set up a call. You can use any tool you like for chatting, although Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and GTalk are some of the most common. Several people can also chat in a group, and some of the tools also allow you to share your screen. If your or vendor company does not allow the use of these chat tool you can check the option of using chat on your intranet portal.

Conference Calls: You can have conference calls using regular phones, but that tends to be expensive. The VOIP phones are widely used now and work well in most cases, as long as your network bandwidth is good. In the US, you can get Vonage phones on which you can make unlimited calls to 60 countries at a reasonable monthly cost (currently $25.99/ month). The other way to use VOIP is via chat tools like Skype and other messengers. All you do is plug in the headsets to your computer and talk for free if both parties are using the same messenger. These tools also allow you to call regular phone numbers at a nominal cost. You can check the actual cost for your tool, but typically it takes 1 or 2 cents per minute to call the US phone numbers and 7 to 8 cents for the India phone numbers. The 800 numbers are free. If you want to set up a conference call and do not have a 800 number, you can use tools like freeconference.com for free.

Virtual Meetings: Virtual meetings are useful when it is important to keep the meetings interactive, although many people use the virtual meeting tools just to run PowerPoint presentations or go over a document. However, the virtual meeting tools allow you to do much more than that. Most have a chat area and a whiteboard that contains text, shapes and eraser tools. Virtual meeting tools are especially good for collaboration so, they help groups work together from different locations. The most commonly used tools are WebEx and Microsoft LiveMeeting.

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