Overcome Offshore Software Project Challenges
Dulcey Branch, is a senior software project manager with over 14 years of experience consulting in a variety of industries including high tech, utility, aerospace and health industries.
She has significant experience with working with offshore resources that code, write and execute test scripts. In this audio interview, she discusses three common project management challenges and how to overcome them. They are:
• Unreliable Infrastructure,
• meetings when there is a large difference in time zones, and
• coders hired to do the development are often not involved in the Analysis and Design of the software.
She shares practical guidance for project teams struggling with these issues.
Approx Length is 7 minutes
Dulcey can be contacted at:
guided_solutions at hotmail dot com
This is a great piece and lays down some challenges running offshore teams. I am CEO of SolveIT Inc, a solutions company based out of westborough, MA. We had been involved in building solutions and have our extended technical team offshore. I used to be a development manager and was involved in setting up offshore teams. I had my fingers burnt and learned a lot from how to actually make offshore teams successful and we implemented the same for lot of our customers. Here are some key to success:
1. When you engage a offshore team into your development, the first thing you will encounter is resistence. The whole initiative will fail if the both the onsite and offshore team don’t trust each other!! We always recommend all our customers to start small, set processes that are comfortable to both teams, start teams colloborating before expanding…
2. Infrastructure used to be an issue but not any more. We have voice over line with local numbers and extensions. We keep in touch through instant messengers and conferencing software like webex. We also have our own product, so we completely understand the importance of flawless communication. It is important to pick a partner in a better developed centers. Say Chennai, Bangalore or Hyderabad has better infrastructure in place when compared to Calcutta or Bhopal etc…
3. Time zones can be an issue and that’s the reason we have onsite project manager working local available all the time. In the first few months of engagement, we also have our team work at least till 1.00 pm and since we are in EST timezone, it makes it bit easier.
The first few months of offshore engagement is a key to its success…