For Project Managers Who Always Deal With Time Zone Challenges
The story was shared by Terry Woodward, who has been a Corporate Project Manager, a Director of Data Services and a Development Manager for SOF Inc., with the total 30 years of Tech experiences. (Visit Terry’s LinkedIn here).
The most exhausting project I was involved in as a project manager was a complex web application project for a large Corporate client, which had an unmovable deadline due to large marketing buys for a specific launch date.
My team was one of three teams working on the project together. It was comprised of both US and offshore developers distributed across four different International time zones.
And this led to the most challenge we have at that time.
The time zone differences.
One developer would complete work and push it to be tested and bugs or changes found in the testing would need to wait a day cycle to be fixed and re-submitted.
What I did
Seeing that the development timing cycle could jeopardize meeting the critical project deadlines, I decided to ask the team if everyone could shift their work schedule.
This allowed we have two hours of overlap between one developer and the next that would be taking the work further.
I also shifted my schedule to overlap so I could catch the tail and the head of the cycle.
Overall, this approach turned a mis-matched schedule into a relatively smooth round-the-clock production schedule.
We did meet our deadline but the schedule change leading up to it, the unmovable deadline, and the all-nighter to get to it promotes it to most exhausting project to complete.
This project brought to light the benefit that can come from looking at standard assumptions with new eyes.
There was standard assumption that work is done between 8 a.m and 5 p.m.
There was an assumption that working in different time zones keeps work sharing separated by time.
There was an assumption that the development cycle is done in a certain sequence.
Wrapping up
So, by looking at the standard assumptions with new eyes, a new project configuration was put in place to transform what seemed initially like weaknesses into viable strengths.
Finally, this challenge illustrated a very human element where team members will be willing to coordinate a shift in standard operating assumptions to meet a group goal.
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