Global capability centers took off in 2020 when organizations had to pivot quickly to unforeseen changes. However, what was once a short-term fix has now transformed into a long-term opportunity. Today, GCCs power organizations with the robustness, resilience, and reliability needed to operate and succeed in a dynamic and competitive market. Yet, several obstacles come in the way of optimizing offshore GCCs for speed and streamlining processes for faster product launches.

The Challenges Facing GCCs

Over the years, GCCs have empowered organizations to drive higher efficiency and cost reduction.

According to Ernst and Young’s Vision 2030 Report, India’s global capability centers (GCCs) will increase from approximately 1,600 GCCs in 2023 to 2,400 GCCs in 2030. Despite this growth, several challenges impact GCCs:

• Increasing competition: The many benefits GCCs help achieve have caused the GCC market’s sudden and widespread growth. Increasingly, more companies are setting up shop and developing their capability and capacity, especially using niche technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Fostering innovation: To stay ahead in the market, GCCs must foster high levels of innovation. This requires them to enable process transformation-led product development and focus on continuous performance improvement while delivering value across the enterprise.
• Strict local laws: GCCs struggle to keep up with evolving local laws that shift their focus from their core business objectives.
• Growing skills gap: For GCCs, the widening skills gap makes it difficult to find, hire, train, and retain a skilled workforce and cultivate the right competencies.
• Accelerating time-to-market: In today’s competitive era, speed is the name of the game. However, most GCCs struggle to accelerate time-to-market due to several inherent challenges, including siloed systems, project complexity, regulatory hurdles, etc.

6 Steps to Take to Speed up Product Launches

Global Capability Centers (GCCs) play a significant role in today’s business world. GCCs are expanding their operations across different cities while exploring new skills and service areas, contributing immensely to job creation, technology adoption, and skills development.

However, given the many challenges they deal with daily, there is an urgent need to rethink strategies to optimize offshore GCCs for speed and streamline processes for faster product launches. Here are six steps to take:  

1. Adopt agile methodologies: GCCs that adopt agile methodologies can adapt more quickly to dynamic business and market requirements. They allow organizations to quickly pivot to new trends and changes and launch updated features and capabilities.
2. Engage with managed teams: Managed teams can act as competent centers of excellence, taking center stage to drive product development and innovation across various GCC operations. By bringing knowledge in AI, cloud, engineering, data analytics, and cybersecurity, managed teams can be the single point of contact for enhancing quality and efficiency.
3. Choose the suitable engagement model: GCCs must opt for the right engagement model to ensure continuous alignment with strategic goals. For instance,

o   Fully managed models can enable expert teams to take end-to-end control over projects and enable peace of mind.

o   Project-based models can enable GCCs to tailor services to individual project needs and customize deliverables.

o   Flexible models can enable organizations to determine the level of service they need based on their budget and requirements.

1. Ensure continuous process optimization:  Global Capability Centers (GCCs) must also ensure continuous process optimization to strengthen operations, reduce redundancy, and improve consistency and productivity. They must combine and centralize operations more efficiently and improve processes to eliminate waste. They must also focus on standardization by establishing and streamlining standard policies and procedures for more significant results.
2. Foster collaboration: Collaboration is vital to GCCs’ success. Frequent collaboration between parent companies and GCCs can keep employees motivated and engaged, ensure projects stay on course, and quickly realize shared goals. It can also help accelerate innovation and drive better product development outcomes.
3. Strengthen governance and compliance: Proactive risk management is also essential for GCCs looking to accelerate product delivery. With the right governance policies, GCCs can implement security measures, ensure compliance with local laws, and drive significant cost savings.

Today’s GCCs are expanding their services with a focus on innovation. However, this increasing focus on innovation is impacting the cost and timeliness of product delivery. Balancing costs with value, especially in these challenging economic conditions, is getting increasingly difficult. Intense competition, strict local laws, and a skills shortage make it difficult—if not impossible—to speed up time to market.

If your GCC struggles to launch high-quality products quickly, enreap as an Atlassian managed teams expert can be the perfect partner to increase agility, improve operational efficiency, and enable substantial cost savings. Choose from a range of engagement models, have a flexible talent pool working around the clock, and ensure the development and delivery of customized solutions. Focus on your core business and leave all your ALM and DevOps worries to us while driving proactive innovation, agility, and compliance.