Traveling Onsite: Reasons (contd.): # 2

Reason 2: Establishing Long-term Relationships

Long term contracts once signed trigger the immediate travel of the middle level executives to the onsite location for establishing the relationship. The nature of such onsite visit is very different from winning new accounts (described earlier). Here the contract has already been signed, bringing in some certainty and confidence in vendor. However, the mid-level executive team is sent to setup the core team for a long term . Some of the key expectations from this core team's travel are:
1. Sufficient absorption of the client's technical environment, processes, and infrastructure.
2. Understanding the client organization's culture, environment and way or working.
3. Establishing communication channels within the client organization's segments.
4. Establish a positive sentiment among the (a bit nervous) staff of client organization due to recent offshore decision.
5. Chalk out the long term communication, collaborative work plans between the two business entities for a healthy business relationship.


Another key point of this kind of onsite travel is that it is non-project specific even though it may appear to be for a particular project. Such contracts are often done under a framework agreement between two companies, and under this umbrella framework agreement multiple project specific agreements are signed. For the first project the core team who travels has few members specific for the project in hand and some key resources for the higher level long term relationship establishment (as mentioned above).