TCL COMS

TCL COMS (Consultancy led Offshore Managed Service) offers our customers the perfect marriage of our consultancy capability with the economic advantage of global delivery units. It represents the way in which TCL believes offshore should be best utilised and brings considerable industry experience to bear in its execution. There is a focus on ensuring that the management of the offshore capability is seamless and near invisible to the customer in terms of communication and management.

Onsite teams are made up of local and offshore resources, with the latter having a minimum of 4 years experience in the country of delivery. This provides the customer with a consistent onsite communicative presence that is capable of overcoming any issues that may arise offshore. We also advocate the use of messaging services, such as MSN to ensure that key communications are recorded and can be referred back to. TCL COMS is driven by a clear communication process, up and down through the management chain, and back and forth through peer level contact. In all instances the implementations are performed by resources familiar with distributed working practices and that they are able to demonstrate a successful track record in such environments.

In the earlier diagram, the area surrounded by red dashes can be fulfilled by either the client or TCL resources. In this manner, the client can either make TCL accountable for the entire project testing, or can retain control and use the TCL resources purely to facilitate an offshore capability.

The solutions are further enhanced with the addition of a dedicated Offshore Delivery Management Team with representation in the UK and India, which ensures efficiency in responding to demand, issue resolution and service improvement. We believe that whilst there are financial advantages to placing work offshore, roles which require high levels of communication are better resourced from the locale in which the role will interface. To this end a blended solution is offered, where prime roles, that of the Account Manager and Test Manager (s), will be sourced from the United Kingdom. Other roles may be sourced globally in order to offer high skill sets at economic cost.

As a preference, TCL work towards an optimisation of resource utilisation as defined below. It is recognised that some activities lend themselves to being performed offshore, but that there is always a need for onshore presence and communication. India is far away and the customer can often feel that they are too remote. This is especially important at the start and end of a project. By managing the testing activity carefully and over a period of time, this blend of resources should be achieved. The time taken to achieve this will vary from client to client and project to project.

The resources applying the effort change over the life-cycle of a project, starting and ending with a heavier focus on management, to define and shape the piece of work and increasing the volume of engineers to take on the more prescribed roles of scripting and execution. The areas where the majority of effort occur are the Preparation and Execution phases and these are also the areas where we would have the majority of the effort offshore.

The team will naturally assume a set service structure as defined below. This looks to ensure that a core presence is maintained both onshore and offshore, with a management layer. This team is then flexed to cope with demand from the client, where the majority of resource increase or reduction is handled offshore. This ensures consistency in the touch points onsite for the project, but also that communication paths once established with offshore remain constant.

Those resources which remain constant will be responsible for the interfacing with the project and ensuring that the testing remains on track, that resources flex as is demanded by the client and that the work undertaken remains on target, both in terms of financials and time.

Continuous improvement is key to the way TCL have grown and worked and this is something that we look to bring to all client relationships. TCL COMS looks to implement service structures that deliver to the clients requirements and then surpass expectations. This is a highly professional service geared to deliver and excel.