A common pitfall encountered in both captive and outsourced operations originates from unrealistic ramp-up expectations, whereby project planners try to start up too many new offshore seats too quickly. Quality is sacrificed for quantity. The most important offshore lesson that new project managers have to learn is that quality has be achieved before ramping up large numbers of seats -- or quality will never be achieved.
The planning and preliminary implementation processes for shifting IT-enabled work to offshore locations are similar for back office work, customer service operations, and knowledge process outsourcing 
, or KPO.
Here we map out the process of offshoring in a manner that allows firms to choose between outsourcing and opening a captive facility once they have completed an assessment of the types of work that could be shifted.
