4 Key Management Lessons From Outsourcing Technology To Global Teams

My journey of managing people across multiple geographies and cultures began in the heydays of the dotcom boom.

The year was 1999; I was in the online brokerage world with DLJ Direct, and it felt like the sky was the limit.

But even within a fast paced fin-tech of its time, attracting talent in a crowded and saturated market was tough.

An even bigger headache was retaining ambitious employees, as there was a constant pull of many to the next entrepreneurial adventure.

It was in this environment that our CIO Suresh Kumar had the foresight to convince senior management to open a captive center in India to tap into the thousands of engineering students entering the market.

Interestingly to note, at the time it was not a cost arbitrage play but a way to get highly skilled workers — a relatively new and innovative concept.

And it was the first time that I had to learn and adapt from managing team members in a geographically connected world, starting with a small extended pool of local technologists.

Fast forward almost 20 years and this organization in India grew to over a peak of 7,000 technologists.

Since that first captive center, I expanded beyond working with our Indian team and managed technologists in Singapore, Poland, Ireland, Germany and many other global locales — and along my journey, I saw first hand how a global team that is streamlined and efficient can create a powerful round-the-clock delivery and support model

Below are a number of key learnings that I feel would be useful to share with those who are about to embark on this path, or who are looking for improvements in their current model and approach.

1.Team Extension:

We had to overcome the cultural norm of having our US teams think of their global team members as vendors or consultants — and instead get them to embrace a team extension model.

The goal of a mature extension team is to confidently give them not just ‘busy’ work, but more technical and complicated endeavors.

By investing in personal relationships, we were able to approach challenges from the same side of the table and I could trust that the highest quality of work would be delivered.

Keep reinforcing this message to your leadership team; that we all were part of one team, with common goals, all driving towards the same outcome

2. 24x7 Ability:

As the power of a global workforce takes hold, it is key to look beyond the cost arbitrage that many corporations seek, and really strive to have a follow-the-sun, “passing the book” work model.

Too often, I see US-based teams having to put countless overtime hours in to meet deadlines, deploy code and be ready to deal with the Friday evening unplanned outages — around the clock.

This is not good for morale, or productivity.

The development of mature team extensions enables leaders to coordinate an elegant hand off to a fully competent extension team in different locations — for example from Asia to Europe, and then back to the US.

For this vision to be realized, a US based leadership structure requires patience, perseverance and belief — with some personal sacrifices along the way — to on-board time zones many hours ahead to produce the desired results.

3. Cultural Norms

One simple yet consistent challenge I found with US leaders who were adjusting to this team extension model was being mindful of the various cultures that they were operating in.

For global businesses. one has to become less centric in their local norms and embrace and leverage their diverse teams.

Be conscious of not scheduling implementations around holidays that are just as important to the global team members as the US based holidays are to each of us.

A good example of this is the Hindu festival, Diwali — which falls at different times each year — something that is obviously important to be mindful of.

Have a cultural minute in your staff meeting/town halls.

Learn to understand the various cultural norm.

Taking the time to do this will go a long way in not only building strong relationships with your extended team, but will foster a more team oriented environment — which as we mentioned earlier is so critical when adopting this model.

4. Time arbitrage:

Play to the strength of leveraging resources when the time zone plays to your advantage.

An example of such an outcome in today’s world is that BNY Mellon have batch monitoring and continuous optimization of US based systems by team members who are able to do this during their local day time.

It also provided a point of escalation in our APAC and EMEA regions should something go “bump” in the US night.

As with the dotcom days — we live in a hyper competitive environment for talent with Silicon Alley, Silicon Valley, Digital Natives and Fin-techs all offering attractive compensation and lifestyles to their technical teams.

The ability to leverage efficiently off your international talent in this world economy will not only ensure that operationally things will run smoother for you — but will also give you a fascinating insight into a culture you may not have been too familiar with.