Align

How will your internal team and your offshoring partner collaborate effectively to ensure successful software development?

Good question. The traditional outsourced software development model – simply standing up projects in an offshore location – leads to flawed outcomes or outright failures. Work practices, communication and collaboration between your onshore team and offshore partner are often out of sync.

The answer? After thousands of successful software outsourcing engagements, we’ve found that clear direction and team building at the onset of the outsourcing partnership provides the foundation for flawless execution by the blended team. Our unique “Accelerance Align” service makes it happen.

How it works

An experienced Accelerance coach will guide your live, co-creation workshop. Your teams will practice working together and agree on how they’ll operate before your project launch. All new teams “form, storm and norm” to learn how to "perform" together.

Align compresses the “storming” phase to quickly create consensus on working norms for your onshore-offshore team upfront. The result is a mutually owned, in-sync approach to building great software, from engagement to delivery.

The Align Approach in Action

Your software outsourcing success depends on a lockstep working relationship with your chosen development partner. Our Align kickoff workshop makes it happen: Your professional coach will prepare your internal team and your new partner to function as "one team" for peak performance.

Align acts as a dress rehearsal before your blended team starts an actual engagement. This immersive, experiential workshop uses:

Exercises

to create shared understanding across teams

Simulations

to practice working together with chosen approaches

Scenarios

to proactively learn how to handle common issues

Syncing your teams for success

During this intensive session, our professional facilitator will coach both your team and your partner to establish shared expectations and a collaboration framework.

Your team comes away with a clear understanding of goals, roles, accountability, approach, communication, decision-making, and other best practices.

Getting on the same page

We’ll examine the fit between your engineering team and your development partner – and determine how to reconcile any differences in working practices or maturity. Align focuses your team on six key areas that are essential for the engagement's success. They are:

Shared Project Vision

What are we going to try to achieve?

Engagement scope and goals
Milestones and plan
Measurements, KPIs and reporting

Culture Mapping

How will we manage a multicultural team?

Varying team and individual styles
Differences in work ethics and norms
Expectations for level of structure

Team Roles

Who will do what?

Organization map of team structure
Clearly defined responsibilities
Work breakdown to the task level

Clear Communications

How can we effectively communicate?

Language proficiency assessment
Tools and use cases
Glossary of common terms (industry, product, software)

Global Team Practices

How will the team operate?

Meeting cadence, agenda and facilitation
Scheduling across time zones
Common governance processes

Methodologies & Tools

What is the unified development approach?

Software development lifecycle
Agile development process and team protocols
Backlog grooming and systems

What's next?

Your Accelerance coach will help document agreed upon processes, procedures and practices.
In parallel, your team is all set to launch its work plan right away.
For support from the executive level, we’ll hold a debrief session with your executives about the jointly developed game plan.

Testimonial

Accelerance completely turned around our experience of software outsourcing by unraveling issues, redefining our processes and metrics, and building a culture of positive, can-do collaboration.

Ron Lichty
Software Engineering Consultant for Splunk, Adobe, Nerd Wallet, and more

Reap the Rewards

Align heads off the risk of team breakdowns in offshoring projects by promoting shared understanding and communications. “Getting Aligned’ delivers measurable beneﬁts including:

Reducing the time until initial deliverables are produced
Increasing speed to reach milestones
Optimizing organizational effectiveness, eﬃciency, and productivity

Ultimately, Align saves you time and money invested in software development. Trust the Align proven approach to get it right from the start.

See how we can put our expertise to work for you…

As the premier global outsourcing advisor, Accelerance delivers top-tier software development resources along with professional consulting services. We have curated the world’s top 1% of proven software development and systems integration firms, along with experienced engagement management professionals

Let’s Get Started

Accelerance Align Custom Workshops