Looking for good PMs. I was reviewing various lists of reasons why information technology projects fail and found it interesting how seldom communication problems are mentioned.  In our offshore IT projects communication problems are at the top of our list by a wide margin. I bet you already knew that.  I was also reviewing the allocation of effort between onshore and offshore and the trends.  In our early efforts about the only thing we did onshore was requirements gathering.  Of course we didn’t have any permanent local presence but this was our strategy.  Over time we developed a local presence but continued in this basic model.  As we found more clients and largely because of the communication challenges we faced, our model gravitated such that, in addition to requirements gathering and analysis, we moved more functions onshore - architecture and design, project management, some amount of testing and level 1 support.  With the adoption of some of the online planning and collaboration tools that have evolved in recent years our business model has stabilized with respect to the allocation of onshore-offshore effort. So where’s the long pole in the tent today?  For us it’s onshore project managers with good multi-lingual communication skills including customer facing skills but perhaps more importantly within the project team.  It's a tough job made more difficult by the time zone differences.