Leadership and change
Moving project workstreams from Poland to the Philippines
The specifics are under NDA, so this is the shape of it rather than the detail.
- 10people onboarded into the offshore team
- No breakin service through the transition
In one line
Project workstreams moved from Poland to the Philippines and service never dropped. I ran knowledge transfer and onboarding for the incoming ten-person team, and supported the PM on risk, planning and documentation through the handover.
Situation
The company decided to move project workstreams from Poland to a team in the Philippines. The project itself was complex: years of accumulated client-specific rules, three concurrent workstreams, and complicated inputs. The incoming team was new to it - ten people who had never worked on this project or anything closely resembling it.
And none of it could interrupt the service. Deliverables carried on going out while the handover happened.
Constraints
No pause. Deliverables kept going out on schedule while the handover happened. There was no window where the work stopped and everyone learned.
What I did
The PM owned the transition design: sequencing, phasing and how the team was split. I owned the knowledge transfer and onboarding inside that structure.
- Audited what already existed. Went through the training and onboarding materials to work out what could be reused, what needed rewriting for a team starting from zero, and what had never been written down at all. I took part of the rewrite myself and delegated the rest to the analysts who owned those areas and reviewed what came back - the fastest way to get the undocumented knowledge onto paper was to have the people carrying it write it down.
- Taught things in the order they’d be needed. The handover ran easiest work first, hardest last, so the training followed the same path - nothing was taught months before anyone used it.
- Built and ran each phase. Shadowing, then supervised delivery, then independent work. Inside each one I produced the materials, updated documentation, set up the practice environment, and ran the readiness checks that told us when a phase was done.
- Coordinated teaching and delivery in parallel. The analysts who knew each area taught it, while the rest carried the delivery load. I coordinated both sides so nothing slipped on either while the handover ran.
- Kept the safety net in place. Through the handover, the Poland team checked the new team’s work before it went out. The client received the same standard of deliverable throughout.
- Measured the handover, didn’t assume it. Tracked run rates and quality results as the incoming team took work on, and reported against where they needed to be. That’s what told us when each phase was finished.
Result
Ten people took on work they had never seen before and the service never broke. Deliverables went out on schedule throughout the handover, and the client’s experience didn’t change.