The struggle to use off shored resources for development and test on a system that is “high maintenance”

Imagine that you are working on a system that has a lot of customers that require day to day maintenance, and this maintenance is manual labour. Your team has development and testing assistance from a team on the other side of the planet, but they are not able to ease the workload of the maintenance tasks. They could on the other hand do a lot of the development/test on the new and fun functions of the system.

In mine point of view this is a loose/loose scenario for your team. Your team get stuck with the maintenance task (which usually is not that fun), and are unable to have time to work on new stuff. The solution is of course; get the offshored team to automate all the maintenance tasks/make tools to automate, while your team start toying around with the new functions. OK. Easier said than done; the offshored team are not allowed to fiddle with production data because of company and country rules and regulations. They could make 0.-version of the automation tools, but they are not able to use them or trouble shoot them when installed in production.

So, Internet, what’s your idea to solve this?