The IT services business comes with its own unique set of challenges – a multitude of concurrent customer projects, incomplete and ever-changing functional specifications, shifting skill set requirements, and the pressure of critical deadlines are just a few to name. Effective resource utilization within this context of risk and uncertainty is well beyond a simple operations management task – it is a very question of survival. These challenges are further accentuated for small and medium-sized IT services organizations that are continuously forced to manage these risks by overextending their resource pool, losing operational efficiencies or by forfeiting legitimate business opportunities due to the shortage of immediately available resources.

LCG’s search for an offshore partner started with exactly such a situation. An opportunity presented itself that exceeded the immediate capacity of the companies’ available resources. The very nature of the opportunity would require a significant hiring commitment from LCG, yet the duration of the project did not fully justify expanding the team with permanent employees. At the same time, dealing with individual temporary contractors would imply a prolonged selection process, higher project costs, and the uncertainty over each individual contractor’s performance. In light of these two unappealing alternatives, LCG chose an innovative solution to engage BridgeQuest as a consolidated supplier of temporary project resources. The thought process behind this decision was simple – select a single offshore outsourcing organization with an established market reputation and a proven track record that offered a large-scale resource pool and flexible economical terms.

Due to the importance of the project, LCG further hedged its risks by first testing the BridgeQuest partnership on a series of smaller, less critical projects. This type of risk mitigation allowed LCG to battle-prove the abilities of BridgeQuest without significant business exposure. Interestingly enough, these series of smaller projects not only provided positive reinforcement for the decision to team up with BridgeQuest, but also defined a new model for expanded collaboration between the two companies. In this model, LCG and BridgeQuest effectively widened the range of potential projects for joint collaboration and turned a single prospect of one large engagement into a long-term, strategic partnership that will span multiple, concurrent engagements.

Presently, LCG and BridgeQuest are working closely to further integrate their operations via shared infrastructure for project scheduling, communications and management, common timesheet reporting, centralized source control management, and unified defect tracking systems.

“Having access to a reliable and highly skilled large-scale resource pool greatly increased LCG’s ability to acquire and deliver on new business opportunities. Our competitiveness is further enhanced by the flexibility and economics associated with the outsourced delivery lab. BridgeQuest is our trusted partner. We are confident that together we created excellent go-to-market strategy with long lasting mutual benefits.” – Bill Sandison, VP of Services, LCG.