Offshore delivery partners, answered in full.

Use one where the work can be specified: engineering volume against a written requirement, an overnight or weekend rota, or a bench you need to scale to twenty people and then hold. The cost advantage is real and large, with TCS listing offshore rates between roughly a quarter and just over half of its own onshore rates for the same SFIA level on the G-Cloud 14 framework. Use a small onshore firm like Tenhaw for the part that cannot be specified yet, which in agentic work is usually the first few months: which exceptions matter, what the data actually contains, where a human stays in the loop, and how roles and decision rights change once an agent takes a decision. Plenty of programmes should buy both, with the boundary written down.

Per head, yes, and by more than most buyers assume. On its own G-Cloud 14 rate card TCS publishes an offshore Level 5 (Ensure, advise) rate in strategy and architecture of £445 a day against £1,330 onshore, and an offshore Level 3 (Apply) rate in development and implementation of £270 against £960. Across that card the offshore price sits between roughly a quarter and just over half of the onshore one for the same level, depending on grade and category. Three caveats travel with those figures. They are competitively tendered public-sector framework rates rather than private commercial ones. They are one supplier's card, not the market. And the document carries no publication date; it was uploaded to the framework in March 2025. The larger caveat is the unit itself: cost per head is not cost per outcome, and the comparable number is team size times duration.

Nearshore trades part of the cost advantage for overlapping working hours, and on agentic work the overlap is usually worth more than the saving, because the expensive thing is not the engineering hour, it is the day lost waiting for an answer about your own data. Past that the two behave the same way. Both are strongest where the requirement can be written down and weakest where it is still being discovered, and neither is normally contracted to change roles or decision rights inside your organisation.

Three things, and none of them is engineering skill. Discovery: agentic workflows are defined by their exception cases, and those live in the heads of people in your building who can give you twenty minutes at a time. Decision latency: a question that takes ten minutes in the room takes a day when it has to be written down, answered overnight and clarified the day after, and this kind of work generates a great many questions. And the organisation: the software can be built anywhere, but changing whose job it is to approve something has to happen where the job is.

Yes, and it is a sensible shape. A common split is that discovery, the operating model, the evaluation criteria and the governance happen onshore and in the room, and the engineering volume that follows a settled specification goes offshore. Tenhaw also sells Programme and Delivery Management on its own at £18,000 to £35,000 a month, with no requirement that we build anything, so we will govern a programme another supplier is delivering. We would write the boundary down, including which side of it we are the wrong choice for.

That is a question for your own data protection officer, and worth asking before the price conversation. An offshore model normally means access from outside the UK, which makes it an international transfer with the paperwork that follows: an IDTA or standard contractual clauses, a transfer risk assessment, and sub-processor notification. Tenhaw's own default is to work inside your estate under your controls rather than copying data to ours, and our Data Processing Agreement covers the same ground, including the sub-processor annex and published insurance cover levels. Neither position is automatically right. A transfer assessment discovered at contract stage is simply the expensive place to find it.