Ever been in a car with dual controls? Where although you were in the driver's seat and responsible for driving the car to the destination, you knew all the way that the person sitting next to you could interrupt the journey at any time; reduce the speed; increase the speed; or stop the car at any time they wanted, and you will have to follow their decision. Well that's exactly how the project manager of an offshore project team feels like.

Offshore projects are parts of or complete projects that another IT firm or department contracts out for many reasons including saving time or money. In most cases, the offshore PM is responsible for managing and controlling the team and work being contracted out and reports to the onshore PM. Now the onshore PM is the person giving out requirements, approving plans and schedules and deadlines.

This is one of the trickiest situations that QA departments are put into. Clients in such circumstances are more concerned about accomplishing the deadlines and staying within the budget rather than process compliance and documentation. Most clients prefer to have their own documentation, reporting and management standards supersede the organization's processes since it ensures avoidance of duplication of effort and does not require them to spend time learning new procedures.

Now unless such clients have a very long term project commitment with the organization, it is virtually impossible for the QA department to incorporate every onshore client's processes to their own in order to maintain uniformity and compliance to standards across the organization. Processes for such projects need to be devised carefully, such that most of the required information is incorporated from client enforced processes with minimum duplication of effort.

In my opinion, offshore projects need to be treated as a delicate category of projects in terms of processes, that need an ongoing support from QA department in order to maintain compliance to organizational standards. In addition to that, quality assurance and quality control need to be marketed as strengths of the organizations and not as hurdles to attainment of project objectives.