Making it work with offshore development teams
This is copied from my LinkedIn article (click here)
We ran a panel discussion in Melbourne sharing stories of succeeding and failing with remote software product development teams that are based offshore.
I’m writing this article to briefly summarise some of the key learnings and insights that came out of the discussion.
The event was hosted in the YBF Ventures Event Space in collaboration with the Agile Project Managers meetup.
Why is this a discussion worth having?
Tech in Australia is a rapidly growing labour force that outmatches the supply.
Growing software companies are put in a position where to scale at a pace that they can remain competitive, they often need to consider looking offshore to match their organisations demand for technical talent.
Execution and selection in this area has become a problem space. It’s not easy to get right, so we got a group of people who could share their experience and started a dialogue.
The session was run by Craig Brown who asked questions, the audience contributed with questions of their own and all 4 panelists added a lot of value with their unique stories and insights.
They were:
- Nicola Nye — Chief of Staff at FastMail
- Tal Rotbart — CIO at PageUp People
- Zaar Hai — Tech Lead & Cloud Architect at Kamanario
- Ranganathan Balashanmugam — Founder & CTO of EverestEngineering
I’m going to share the insights and summarise the lessons shared over the 50 minute discussion.
The Insights
The key things:
- Don’t treat it like a cost cutting exercise, if your primary intention is to reduce cost then you won’t be looking for the right qualities.
- Always look for people who ask questions. This includes providers and people joining your company.
- Treat your providers as partners and treat their team members as you would treat your own, spend time making sure they get the big picture.
- People are people and employee or partner they are motivated by the value they contribute to the world.
- You will need to manage time zones, be ready to proactively plan what time of the day particular things get done.
- Be sure you have the capability within your company to manage the operational complexity you have to overcome to get value from offshore teams.
- Choose carefully what you send offshore and what you maintain locally. You want to distribute work that feels valuable for offshore teams to engage in the purpose of.
The guiding principles and things you can do to achieve them
As well as the hard facts, it was found that empathy, communication, culture and equality were key principles for building the consistent behaviours across locations.
Empathy
A high standard of communication is essential to develop the empathy and trust required to collaborate effectively when geographically distributed.
Things you can do:
- Invest in travel and co-locating team members for periods of time.
- Frame all commercial relationships as a partnership and collaborate accordingly.
- Create experiences that increase the human connection between teams and organisations.
- Show strong discipline in rituals like Sprint Planning, Standups, Retrospectives and Showcases.
- Schedule in opportunities to step back and reflect together on the effectiveness of communication across teams.
- Keep an open communication line across tools like Slack.
Culture
It was clear that it is essential to build a shared culture around customer value and the approach to work. The panelists all felt very strongly that equality should be ubiquitous.
Things you can do:
- Use consistent language across teams about the purpose of tasks and desired outcomes, and encourage participation in the creation of purpose where appropriate.
- Use consistent methods for the motivation and engagement of your people across your entire workforce.
- Spend time over video conference with team mates without outcome based agendas. AKA get to know each other as people
- Invest in things like 24/7 live streams, and robots that drive around for you to make contact with people in other offices.
- Proactively seek out “us and them” type behaviour to understand where it comes from and how to address it.
Last words
A final question was asked at the end of the session.
If you were to give one piece of advice and one piece of advice only, what would it be?
- Make sure you are sure you understand each other — Zaar
- Work on your empathy, that’s basically it — Tal
- Think about humanity, fundamentally you’re all in this together — Nicola
- Small experiments; build trust — Ranganathan
For anyone who made it this far, thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments feel free to go below or email me on Ringo@Everest.Engineering
Thanks
