Return to Archive Runtime - The Software Outsourcing Newsletter for Executives and Investors from Accelerance and Steve Mezak Keeping In Touch With Your Offshoring Team Keeping in touch with your offshore team is critical to the success of your outsourcing. That seems pretty simple, but when you factor in accents and time zones, your ability to communicate well can be seriously hurt. I had dinner with a client in San Francisco recently and this was exactly his concern. He did not care about security issues. Nor did he worry about the safety of his intellectual property. The biggest problem he experienced with outsourcing was the communication problem. When it was daytime here, he wanted to move documents back and forth but the servers can be down at night in India. The engineers in each country have trouble understanding the other. The accents and the fatigue of late night or early morning conference calls reduce the ability to share ideas and brainstorm. These were the frustrations he had with outsourcing. Much is lost without the intimacy of direct communication. Without good communication, barriers are created between your local people here and "them": the guys one or two oceans away that are supposed to be writing your software. At that dinner in the fancy restaurant in San Francisco, our waiter had a French accent which made him a little difficult to understand. But our interaction with him went well. Our communication was helped by pointing at the menu and being familiar with the things you normally expect to happen in a restaurant. We placed our order, the delicious food came and we paid the bill. There was a structure to our interaction that helped us get what we wanted - a great meal. Structure and experience also helped our waiter deliver great service so he could earn a nice tip. All three of us were satisfied with the end result. Similarly you should have a clear structure to the communications with your offshore team. It starts with the kind of information you plan on communicating and sharing. What kind of information do you need to provide so your offshore team can start developing your software? How will you handle questions and issues and how often? The overhead required to make outsourcing work depends on the skills of people both onshore and offshore. You need to put processes in place and use tools to minimize that overhead. Many companies that outsource use weekly conference calls and exchange emails and instant messages as needed, sometimes every day. In addition there is a bug tracking and source code control systems and each software release is delivered as a zip file of source files. Here are some other tools that you should be using: Project Management: Keep your outsourcing on course by tracking delivery dates, scope and budget. You can manage milestones, SLA baselines, project and sub-project plans, tasks and resources. It should be compatible with MS Project and support import/export of Project files. Resource Management: Identify and track the engineering talent on your project and rate their performance. Time Recording: Track your software projects' progress by viewing the actual time spent on tasks and comparing it to planned estimates. Document Management: Unify your teams by enabling them to share and manage key documented information affecting your software project's outcome. Requirements Management and Traceability: Capture and analyze your requirements and trace their progress throughout the project to ensure they're being delivered as agreed upon. Notify relevant team members and stakeholders when a requirement has been changed, not completed or approved, to help you head off issues before they affect your bottom line. Issue Tracking and Defect Tracking: Successfully manage the lifecycle of each issue and defect to its resolution. Change Management: Keep expectations in-line and prevent over payments by managing each stage of a change request, including tracking its cost, and schedule implications. Test Management: Achieve the level of quality your software requires by managing your testing cycles. You can track and confirm the status of test plans, trace test cases to requirements, review the results of all test scripts, and analyze and audit current test results against historical results. It can be difficult to put together a collection of tools like this on your own although many people cobble together tools and systems from open source offerings. Now Accelerance is delivering an an easy low-cost alternative — an on-line hosted solution for you to keep in touch with your outsourcing team. It also has a roles-based dashboard enabling you to keep on top of and manage the critical factors affecting your outsourcing from start to finish. Whether you use a commercial offering, or put a collection of tools together yourself, the list above contains the functions you need to implement. But to make it even easier for you, Accelerance offers the complete functionality described above completely free for software development projects that begin by the end of July. Give us a call or send me an email today to learn more about using this free service to keep in touch with your outsourcing team. Until next time, Steve Mezak Accelerance, Inc. Risk-Free Outsourcing www.Accelerance.com 213 Garcia Avenue Half Moon Bay, CA 94019 1-650-712-8990 Contact me by email (c) 2005 Accelerance, Inc. All rights reserved. You are free to use material from the "Runtime" eZine in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read: "By Steve Mezak, CEO of Accelerance, Inc. Please visit the Accelerance web site at http://www.Accelerance.com for more information and resources on outsourcing and creating great software products."