I built my first nearshore hub in 2013, at Société Générale — roughly 150 people, about a third of the bank's Bucharest IT centre. I've stood up or run one every few years since, across four more organisations, and the failure pattern barely changes. A nearshore model places delivery capability in a geographically closer location than a traditional offshore model. The promise is attractive: broader access to skills, closer time-zone alignment and easier collaboration. Yet proximity is only an enabler. Sustainable performance depends on how the delivery system is designed.
A nearshore team should be managed as a product and delivery capability — not as a remote pool of individual resources.
The operating-model choices that matter
Using Agile methods appropriately
Scrum can provide a regular planning, review and improvement cadence. Kanban can make flow and bottlenecks visible. Extreme Programming practices can strengthen engineering quality. These approaches are not interchangeable labels; the selection should reflect the nature of the work, dependency structure and product maturity.
Conditions for effective collaboration
- A shared definition of value, quality and done.
- Overlap hours designed around real collaboration needs.
- Direct access to business and technical decision-makers.
- Transparent dependencies and escalation paths.
- Knowledge maintained in the team rather than concentrated in individuals.
- Continuous improvement backed by measurable actions.
What executives should measure
Cost remains relevant, but it should not dominate the scorecard. Leadership should also observe predictability, lead time, quality, service resilience, knowledge concentration, employee capability and stakeholder outcomes.
Common failure modes
Nearshore initiatives underperform when organisations retain all decision-making onshore, rotate people too frequently, optimise utilisation at the expense of flow, or treat ceremonies as a substitute for product ownership. I've inherited every one of these mistakes from a predecessor at least once. The remedy is operating-model clarity and shared accountability — unglamorous work, and the only thing that has ever actually fixed it.
Alin Popovici
Executive advisor, transformation and delivery leader — and a guest lecturer on complex-programme leadership for the Executive MBA at Bucharest Business School (ASE Bucharest, in partnership with CNAM Paris).