Offshoring - lessons and observations from the coal-face

IT is all about adaptation and change, if you can’t handle it, you’re in the wrong industry.

October 2013. My fifth trip to India and like my previous trips it was as eventful, colourful and fun as ever. I really love visiting this country, the people are really cool, the food hot and the culture vibrant. It’s a great place to visit for work in IT and I have had many wonderful experiences being there. This following series of blog posts will deal with some of my major observations of working with IT Delivery projects in India, and the challenges and observations that I have made over the last 10 years being involved with them from initially as a .NET/COM developer through to Solution Architecture and DevOps

First up let me say that there are lot of great things about offshoring that work and work very well. Managed services work, call centres and help-desks are great candidates for offshoring because, by and large, the processes they follow are (usually) well-defined and the steps to resolve and assist with issues are highly prescriptive. Application delivery however is a very different beast and this is what I am going to concentrate on.

In a typical IT application delivery project you are always going to require some base, non-negotiable fundamentals for success such as:

• Strong management support to streamline and plan work
• Close collaboration and good working relationships between teams – in Agile that goes without saying
• Good architecture and well-defined requirements – complemented by governance processes to manage gaps and change.
• People who can think laterally to solve issues and solve them early, quickly and efficiently
• Good investment in development and environment infrastructure to ensure there are no excessive downtimes waiting for software to build and deploy.
• An embedded culture of continuous improvement and automation to future-proof against risk and maintain a high quality of work
• Plenty more but that will do for now.

Running a delivery project offshore is no different however it is amazing at how of all the items I listed above, how poorly done they can be when their importance is scaled done or the corners end up getting cut in an effort to rein in costs.

Cutting corners on an IT Delivery project is always be a very stupid thing to do, but this is exacerbated so much more when you throw offshore delivery into the mix. Simply put if you believe that being able to deliver software offshore for your customers will be fundamentally cheaper for you as a business than doing it onshore, or you can cut corners such as not invest heavily in supporting infrastructure and staff, reduce travel budgets, or not hire experienced architects, testers, developers and DevOps staff because people will just “work harder” or “work smarter” then you are delusional.

One of the most important things to ensure success is the implementation of effective communication between teams and the right infrastructure to support it such as video conferencing, tools like Lync and frequent travel back and forth. Failure to do this creates an “us and them” culture that spreads like a virus. If it is not addressed, the environment can turn very toxic as the bad blood spreads from the teams at the lower end of the spectrum, who are usually the most fearful of losing their jobs, bubbling up to the top causing reactionary and defensive tactics on both sides to avoid accountability

Typically the end results of this are onshore teams will try their hardest to put down, discredit and deliberately (in extreme cases) sabotage work done by offshore. Conversely offshore teams will become hell-bent on proving how much better they are than the onshore teams by constantly raising issues, escalating even the most trivial problems to management and being deliberately vague and obtuse, even lie, to avoid doing work or taking responsibility.

In short nobody wins, and if these toxic attitudes are left unchecked to fester then all hell breaks loose, projects fail, and people leave the company. I’ve seen numerous cases where onshore staff turn highly aggressive in telephone conferences as the pressure builds, finger pointing emails begin flowing back and forth, and everything descends into an ugly mess. And all this within the same company – thankfully clients were never witness to things like this!

 And it is really stupid because it is so easy to rectify by doing a couple of simple things such as:

1. Have a lot of onshore/offshore travel so the teams mix and integrate. Once every few months is not enough, people should be flying back and forth every two weeks so relationships are formed and people get comfortable with each other.
2. Don’t place employees on these projects that have difficulty dealing with offshore teams. For some people cultural barriers are just too much to overcome and they will be affronted with the feeling of being forced to adapt and change “their ways” to suit others. These people need to be weeded out immediately

But considering this stuff has been documented 1000 times over, and a lot better than what I can do, I’ll instead delve into some other areas

Coming up next time: The Cost Delusion