An unwilling customer

When a software project is outsourced or offshored to a faraway land, its obvious  that it has gone through a very tough decision making process for the stakeholders of the company. When the decision is done you will find not everyone is equally happy. Especially the technical team is  always bit reluctant. They have their reasons, starting from discomfort of working with people from different culture, to fear of losing importance in the company.

But in most cases this technical team is being asked to assess the outsource service provider and later work with them. This is a challenge other than the technical challenge itself, for the offsite team to gain trust and respect from the onsite team and successfully work together and deliver the  project.

This challenge can be addressed though few core steps.

By building personal relationship
This one is the most important. Without a strong personal relationship with the onsite team most offsite effort

Selise team challenges the onsite team

would ultimately fail. Even at the time of Skype and Hangout, I believe this personal relationship cannot be built with a strong foundation without visiting each other.  Each project needs planning and budget which allows each team to visit the other with a regular interval. Its always  a good idea to start a project onsite with a team combining onsite and offsite members and after one or two sprints break away.



By adopting the standards and tools of the OnSite team
If the onsite team has a set of standards regarding development which they follow, off-site team should adopt to those standards. Standards could vary from coding standards to development process standards, configuration management standards to quality standards. It good to use the tools used by the onsite team if they are habituated with it for long.  It creates additional comfort for the onsite team having known tools in a new operating mode.

By introducing transparency
Its almost impossible to visualize what the other team is doing at any given moment if you do not have a transparent way to produce and deliver this information. Let the onsite team have access to off-site teams calendar, scrum board, burndown chart and issue tracker.  Let the product owner of onsite team join your daily scrum, if not possible at least have a weekly meeting. Do the sprint demo in front of the whole onsite team over webex.

By addressing the pointing finger attitude
Pointing finger is a disease in every corporate house. When you  see Onsite team is trying to burn you,  the smartest way of handling the situation is to take responsibility proactively. Justifying the failure even with most strongest excuse mostly fires back. In case of a failure.   always take responsibility, analyse the cause of the failure and propose concrete steps which can be taken to improve future delivery.

A reluctant onsite team can cause major project damage or even put the whole operation in jeopardy if program management from both side fails to find and act accordingly. Distributed development is not easy,it has its own challenges and like any other great challenges it has be dealt with open mind and brave heart.

Offshoring 01: Software Offshoring to Bangladesh

Bangladesh is at this moment could be the best place to setup an offshoring operation for any software company. In this blog series I will try to explain why and how you could setup an offshoring operation and look at the major challenges you will have to overcome.

Why Bangladesh? I summarize them into 2 reasons, Cost and Talent pool. Let’s have a closer look.

Cost

Bangladesh is still cheap. Office space rent in Dhaka is 50% of Bangalore, India, 33% of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Later we will take detail look at each of the infrastructural costs but in summery Bangladesh is cheap in all respect comparing to India or any other surrounding emerging economy. Developers salaries are still quite low as the living cost is low. Service cost is minimal, administration salaries are almost invisible. You could run an 50 employee team in Dhaka with full infrastructure with the cost of a 10 employee office in US.

Talent Pool

Scrum Team @ Selise

Bangladesh has produced a huge pool of Computer Science graduates over last 20 year and still continuing. It has over 30 public and more than 100 private universities where 45 of them are located in Dhaka. Many of the them are specialized Science and Technology university and almost all of them have dedicated Computer science departments. As the industry is growing many of the talented minds are driven towards CS and that gives you access to a huge pool of experienced developers, QC, UxD and project managers.

Bangladesh is a gold mine now, its a window of 5 to 10 years. Prices will go up, all the big players like Google and Microsoft will be here, talent pool will get drained in this time. If you can move in now you will rule the place.

Many are already in. Samsung, Vizrt, Metatude , Orbitax, Cefalo, Selise,  IMH health,  ImpleVista  are just a few of them. Some of them are here for over a decade.

On the next episode we will talk about finding the right partner to start your venture.