Exploring Storytelling as a Knowledge Transfer Technique in Offshore Outsourcing

Effective communication between partners and successful knowledge transfer are critical success factors in offshore-outsourced projects. They are also a significant challenge. Cultural distance between partners and a lack of common frames of reference inhibits a common interpretation of information in ways that can be difficult for message senders to foresee. When a message is liable to be misunderstood, perhaps the most effective strategy is contextualization. A known technique for contextualizing information, which is being used increasingly in business contexts, is storytelling. Over recent years, storytelling has gained prominence as a technique for intraorganizational knowledge management. The potential of storytelling in offshore outsourcing is largely uninvestigated. We adopt an action research approach to investigate storytelling as a potential knowledge transfer technique in offshoreoutsourced software development projects. Findings suggest that storytelling can be an effective form of communication in the early stages of projects and can improve knowledge transfer outcomes.