Seven questions to ask before you sign a nearshore team
By The Nearscale Team
Most nearshore engagements do not fail on day one. They fail three months in, when the people who sold the project have moved on, the team is missing a skill nobody checked for, and switching partners would cost more than staying. The questions that prevent that are simple. Most buyers skip them because the proposal already looks good.
Here are the seven we recommend asking before you sign.
1. How many hours do we actually share?
Ask for the working hours of every person who would touch your work, not just the account manager. A team in Mexico usually overlaps fully with US time zones, but "overlap" can mean two hours of standup or a full shared day. Write the minimum overlap into the contract.
2. Who will do the work, by name?
Ask for the profiles of the engineers, consultants or analysts who would be assigned, with their years of experience and the systems they have run. If the answer is "our bench will cover it", ask what happens when the person you interviewed is replaced.
3. What happens when someone leaves?
Turnover is normal. The question is how quickly the partner replaces people, how much handover time they include, and whether they document the work as they go. Ask for their average tenure on client teams and how they measure it.
4. How do you handle a skill that is hard to find?
Every partner says they can source talent. Ask what they do when a niche profile does not exist in the market: a longer search, a training plan, a senior person who mentors a junior one. The answer shows whether they plan for gaps or hide them.
5. Who owns the code, documentation and access?
Before work starts, confirm in writing that your organization owns the deliverables, that repositories and credentials stay under your control, and that documentation lives where your team can read it. Ownership disputes are much harder to settle at the end of a contract.
6. What does a bad month look like?
Ask for an example of a project that went off track and how they recovered it. You are not looking for a perfect record. You are looking for a clear escalation path, honest reporting and a willingness to name the problem early.
7. How do we exit?
Read the termination and transition terms before anything else. Notice periods, knowledge transfer obligations and the cost of moving the work elsewhere tell you more about the relationship than the first three months of the pitch.
The short version
A good nearshore partner answers these questions without hesitation and puts the answers in the contract. If a question gets a vague reply, that is the one to push on before you sign.