Risks in business process offshoring are extensive. Since, often, awareness of risks can mean avoiding them, managers lacking offshoring experience are particularly vulnerable. One way to understand the dimensions of these risks is to view them through the prism of the offshoring lifecycle, which defines the totality of decisions and actions that must be taken from the offshoring idea on the front end through a steady state relationship with an offshoring service provider (OSP) on the back end.