Managing Software Developers Across Borders

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Comment by Daniel Leuck on March 12, 2009 at 10:22am

Hi Brian, Excellent point about face-to-face get togethers and the importance of group socialization. We actually go a step beyond this by locating at least one member from management at the offshore location and rotating team members between the locales. Of course, this is only possible when you have multiple long running projects that allow you to get a dedicated team from the offshore outsource company.

Comment by Brian Russo on March 12, 2009 at 1:22am

Gotta point out that these pretty much all apply to "regular" projects also :)

Slightly OT, but I've always found it interesting how the geography of a work site plays out. Different sections and different people near each other influence how work gets done (or doesn't). Not remarkable, but most people don't really think about it explicitly.

I think video is really important; communication is extremely inefficient without visual cues as most communication is non-verbal.

It's much easier to speak with someone over the phone or via text chat once you have met them in person or at least seen them because you pickup their mannerisms so much faster. You can learn how a person communicates without ever meeting them face to face but it takes much much longer. Particularly when people are stressed, a lack of non-verbal communication is problematic.

To that list I would add periodic face-to-face get togethers where socialization is a big goal. At least twice a year, ideally more often. Depends on the culture and feasability.

Comment by Konstantin A Lukin on March 8, 2009 at 3:57pm

I like the picture.. makes me think of something like being an Intercontinental DJ.. guessing it is full of exciting new learning opportunities.

Comment by Daniel Leuck on March 8, 2009 at 8:32am

Hey Brooke - Thank you for sharing your card game ice breaker / social experiment. It sounds a bit evil. I like it :-) Your comment about people having different motivations is spot on. I think the problem with a lot of outsourcing efforts is that the motivations of the customer and the outsource team are too different. I refer to this as the "us and them" syndrome. When you make them feel like part of your team, and incentivize them in a similar way, you align interests. There will always be some delta and, as you rightly point out, its important to be sensitive to this.

Lay-Yong: I agree with all and I think it is also important to retain and encourage knowledge sharing from the offshore team by having something like a knowledge base system.

I agree. We use Atlassian's Confluence wiki and Jira issue tracker for these purposes. Disclosure: We are Atlassian partners.

Comment by Brooke Fujita on March 8, 2009 at 2:31am

In a former life, well before I became a coder, I worked as an English teacher in Japan. Whenever we had to conduct large-group seminars or lessons, one of my favorite ice breakers was this “game” (the name escapes me, but really, the name of this game does not matter) where we would divide our audience into groups of 6 or more, all sitting around a deck of cards. We would then pass out to each and every participant printed instructions in English for a simple card game. After giving the participants some time to read and absorb the game rules, the print game instructions were all collected, and we let them begin the card games.

What we did not tell the participants was that all of the printed instructions were slightly different from each other. In other words, they were all expecting to be playing the same card game, when in reality they were all operating on very slightly different rules.

The more observant players were pretty quick to pick up that everyone at the table was not playing by the same rules. These were the ones that were soon laughing, and enjoying the rather odd situation. Others became frustrated, and I suppose some of them may have even accused others of cheating (or at the very least, not reading the English card game instructions correctly).

I really liked to run this exercise in cultural awareness whenever I got the chance. It was interesting to see how people behaved and reacted when placed in such a situation. Of course, I just loved sitting back and watching the confusion unfold. But I digress.

Dan is spot on for all of the nine points he lists. If I can add to this, I would say this: everyone on the team must come to understand that the others may be operating with different motivations, even if the goal is the same. I think it would be best for a project distributed across country borders if all participants could speak the same language, but even then, one must really work extra hard at communication. Culture colors language, so perhaps an ideal measure to avoid the “us versus them” trap would be if the entire team could spend some time together just to see how they are alike and how they are different. Having people on the team who are multilingual and multicultural also goes a long way in bridging gaps.

It is true that offshore development is not the perfect fit for all business needs. But I do believe that given the proper requirements and a team with the right stuff, it really needn’t be painful. (At least, not as painful as I’ve seen… oy!)

Comment by Lay-Yong on March 7, 2009 at 2:38pm

Thanks for sharing the 9 impt factors! They were interesting. I agree with all and I think it is also important to retain and encourage knowledge sharing from the offshore team by having something like a knowledge base system.

Comment by Daniel Leuck on March 5, 2009 at 4:40pm

The locals know what is and isn't safe. You will learn from them. Note that this isn't a concern in all the locations I mentioned. Its also very important not to ask an expat manager to do something you wouldn't do yourself. I always visit new locations and spend enough time to get a feel for the quality of life.

Comment by Cameron Souza on March 5, 2009 at 3:44pm

> Safety of expatriates

What about the safety of the locals?