Requirement #3: Match the Project to the Team
You can put lipstick on a pig but it doesn’t do much good. It’s not much to look at, and it annoys the pig. You can assign any old set of tasks to the offshore team, but if they CAN’T succeed at the project, or DON’T CARE about succeeding at the project, you won’t get much value and you’ll have ended up annoying the team.
Agile methodologies have taught us all the benefits of keeping the customer tied into the development process. We know the offshore team will have less of a context for managing changes and usually will average less years of experience than the corporate team.
That doesn’t mean you can try to do the “thinking” for them. There are as many smart people in Moscow and Bangalore as there are in Silicon Valley, just fewer Starbucks.
There are two common failure modes in defining projects for the offshore team:
- Asking a remote team to solve a complex problem the customer might not understand; or
- Asking the remote team to grind through endless bug fixes to a stable product line.
In the first, it’s easy to see that the customer isn’t getting any happier with each release. In the second, the failure will be the Dutch Elm Disease of application development: developer turnover.
Developer turnover comes from multiple sources, many of which you don’t control. Given the heavy cost of recruiting and training new hires, it pays to stay on top of the factors you do influence. Everybody wants to be successful, and will stay on a successful project longer than on an unsuccessful one. So pick the project wisely.
Great projects for remote teams are ones that have very well defined deliverables but ambitious long-term goals. Projects like cloning capabilities of one system to another, changing platforms or improving performance of an app, all benefit from clarity of definition and sufficient technical challenge to keep the remote team productive and engaged.
Epilog
In my humble experience, meeting these three requirements eliminates the additional risk created by an offshore development group, and reduces the problem to the same set of risks as an onshore development group. Not that onshore development is easy.
Are three requirements really all it takes? Yes, because all three are meta-requirements that cover the most important challenges of offshoring. In fact, a superstar remote team lead (Requirement #1) can be enough in itself to deliver success. Superstars are so hard to find we can’t count on finding them. That’s why you need to maximize your success rate by meeting requirements 2 and 3 as well.
Bonne Chance, Bueno Suerte, Удачи, and Good luck!
