By William R. Dodson
I hate 7 am conference calls. I’m never at my
cultural best. And you have to be nice when you’re talking with
India. Working across time zones of cross-continental proportions is definitely
a project management liability.
“What’s the time difference?” my American
co-workers called out to the speaker phone. “Nine and a half hours,”
the reply crackled back through the receiver. “Why a half?”
someone whispered. The co-conspirator shrugged. “For the whole country?”
“Yes,” was the echo from across the ocean. It meant a seven
o’clock in the morning conference call that everyone in the American
office had to make.
It was the first information technology project the
esteemed insurance company was taking completely offshore, to India. Design
and project management were to remain in Boston, in America, but everything
else – programming, unit testing, system testing, performance testing
– was happening in Bangalore, India. The insurance company had had
good luck with its Bangalore partner during the remediation of millions
of lines of COBOL programming code during the Y2K scare at the turn of
the century. Now, the business wanted to take another step closer to outsourcing
the efforts of entire departments it had supported in-house.
I recall one of the Indian representatives who worked
at the American office, a small, self-effacing fellow with dark rings
under his eyes. “Do you live in Boston?” I asked the fellow.
“No,” he said with a wan smile. “My
family lives in California.”
“You must miss them quite a lot,”
I said.
“Yes, well, I go home every weekend.”
I was shocked by the man’s devotion to work and
family. His soul was literally strung out across two-thirds of the earth’s
surface. He lived across at least fifteen time zones.
The 24/7 promise of delivery has meant that corporations
have begun ingeniously employing technology to speed up the return on
their investments and to hopefully increase the returns. So, now, cars
can be designed in Italy, the chassis built in Korea and the accessories
developed in America, all pieced together in a maquilladora on the Mexico/U.S.
border. Or, software can be designed in America, written in India and
tested in China. IBM developed its Beans technology and the Java Beans
toolset across four software development groups in five countries: China,
India, Belarus and Latvia.
Coordination across the time zones then becomes the
primary challenge in actually taking advantage of “following the
sun.” Coordination includes getting the right resources where they
need to be when they’re required, and facilitating communications
across the business units. Originally, IBM had centralized project management
office (PMO) and quality assurance in Seattle for its Beans project. The
PMO required a team that was 30-people large. Eventually, following the
sun was so productive an approach that the Seattle PMO – the hub
at the center of the spokes – became the bottleneck for passing
deliverables back offshore. Eventually, IBM management slimmed the PMO
down to three individuals with responsibility for schedule, budget and
communications coordination. They delegated design, development and testing
responsibilities to the satellite offices, which then increased the amount
of communication they had with each other.
In my own experience in developing a PMO that facilitated
communications and resource allocation that spanned four continents, we
met with great success in removing bottlenecks and misunderstandings that
were costing efforts around the world mightily. Instead of seeing all
of the work that was being done to develop and to implement the software
product at client sites as a single product development project, the PMO
developed a portfolio of products, much like a mutual fund manager maintains
a related yet independent mix of assets.
Key to the freer flow of resources and communications
was a weekly phone conference that I would facilitate between project
representatives all over the world. We had all been trained together at
a single site before dispersing to the four corners of the planet, and
had worked with each other in various cities around the world. Being able
to picture the faces of the participants made facilitating the conferences
far easier. Also, the degree of trust between participants was high because
of previous face-to-face contact. Trust made the self-motivated shuffling
of resources worldwide easier, so expertise could be had before project
risks became unfortunate realities. Occasional teleconferences over satellite
links, so we could see one another’s faces, helped shore up the
trust that the colleagues were corporeal beings we still enjoyed working
with.
There was the occasional 7 am conference call, but
we worked to share the pain and inconvenience across time zones. It helps,
then, to dislodge the PMO on occasion, not only so the heart of the project
can get closer to some of the projects, but also so that managers can
better know its soul: the staff immersed in the world.
Author Bio: William R.
Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Communications, L.L.C., a management
consultancy that builds and improves working relationships across cultures.
He is a contributing editor of American Management Association’s (AMA)
MWorld Journal of Management. He can be reached at wdodson@silkrc.com
or +1 (847)722-7817.
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