At IBM I helped stand up a delivery centre from zero for a major banking client — close to a thousand people eventually, spread across Bucharest, Casablanca and Lille. Centers that size don't fail on the real-estate decision. They fail on the operating model, months after the ribbon-cutting, once the novelty has worn off. A dedicated nearshore center can expand access to talent, improve delivery proximity and create a scalable capability. However, the center should not be treated as a real-estate or recruitment initiative. It is a transformation of accountabilities, processes, knowledge and leadership.
The first design question is not “Where should the center be?” but “What capability should the enterprise own and why?”
1. Clarify the strategic mandate
Define the services and capabilities in scope, the business outcomes expected, the required level of control and the intended evolution of the model. Make trade-offs explicit: cost, proximity, skills, resilience, speed and strategic ownership.
2. Assess candidate locations
Use a balanced decision model covering talent availability, competition, language, accessibility, business environment, ecosystem maturity, infrastructure and operational resilience. Avoid choosing a location on labour cost alone.
3. Design the target operating model
4. Build the mobilisation plan
Sequence legal and administrative readiness, leadership appointments, recruitment, workplace and technology enablement, process deployment and communications. Establish a single integrated plan with dependencies and decision gates.
5. Execute knowledge transition
Structure knowledge capture, shadowing, reverse shadowing, competency validation and service-readiness reviews. Protect business continuity by defining entry and exit criteria for each transition wave. This is the phase every steering committee wants to compress, and the one I've never seen compressed without a service incident to show for it.
6. Scale through capabilities
Move deliberately from individual roles to stable teams, skills centers, centers of excellence and, where appropriate, outcome-accountable shared services. Scale only when leadership, governance and knowledge mechanisms are ready.
Executive governance
A sponsor-led steering model should track business outcomes, talent, service performance, transition risk and organisational adoption. The center becomes sustainable when local leadership is empowered and the wider enterprise treats it as an integrated capability — not a cost line to be reviewed once a quarter and otherwise ignored, which is still the default I run into most often.
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).