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Jain, Radhika, Poston, Robin S., and Simon, Judith C. 2011. “An Empirical Investigation
of Client Managers’ Responsibilities in Managing Offshore Outsourcing of Software
Testing Projects,” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (58:4), pp. 743-757.
Despite an increase in the offshore outsourcing of information technology (IT) projects,
little research has been carried out to identify issues that client managers (CMs)
encounter when managing projects with offshore vendors. Also research on how CMs'
responsibilities change to effectively manage offshore outsourcing relationships has
received little attention. We conducted a case study of an offshore outsourcing relationship
between a U.S. client and its Indian vendors engaged in software-testing projects.
In this paper, we identify six project management activities that underwent substantial
change. We then describe the coping strategies that CMs employed effectively to deal
with changing project management activities. We conclude by discussing the interplay
of multiple global boundary variables and its effect on the project management activities.
We integrate insights from literature on global distributed teams, organizational
communications, and offshore outsourcing to theoretically ground the relationship
between the boundary variables and the coping strategies.
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