If You're Going to Offshore, Get it Right

In general, I prefer having fully co-located teams but I've been working with a number of organizations that use off-shoring as part of their delivery model. Some have the right approach, others are missing the mark.

When one organization I worked with decided to move to a Scrum framework, they were also setting up an off-shore model with developers in India. In this case, they brought those developers to the U.S. to be part of the team formation process; learning the Scrum framework, setting up a team operating agreement etc.

When these individuals went back to India, they were set up with the right equipment; good audio and video capability that gave then a tele-presence ability. Each morning the US based part of the team would go to a video conference room and spend the first part of their day with the India part of the team. They could see/hear each other well, share documents, and even walk through code together. It was a pretty effective approach.

Counter this with another client of mine. They also have India-based developers, but they have not had the opportunity to travel to the US. They don't have any real tele-presence, just conference calls and screen sharing. They don't really participate, just listen in on discussions from a US based conference room. Self-organizing is also absent, they are assigned tasks by the lead developer, who is in the US. My observation is that they aren't getting much value out of this approach.

I'm a fan of the Media Richness Theory and have used it with my clients. I have also taken a page from Crew Resource Management (CRM) and their communications practices. One of my favorite assertive communications tools is SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation). I have taught this technique to a number of teams as part of a focus on building up their teaming capability.

Given the choice, I would have all my teams co-located. When that isn't possible, I try to bring them together as often as possible and use good tele-presence tools when they are not together. Regardless of your model, you still have to teach them good communications and teaming techniques so they can be as effective as possible in any configuration.