Welcome to India

As I write this article I am still seeing the face of the little barefoot girl (about 9 years old) who asked me for money upon my arrival in Hyderabad, India this week. I am a hardened New Yorker and I don't give money to panhandlers on the NYC subway. Most of them are emotionally disturbed and I have long ago gotten tired of con-artists who try to convince me that I should give to the homeless "organizations" that travel the subways to handout free sandwiches. I'm a New Yorker, I have seen everything and I am pretty tough. My stopover in Mumbai lasted only a few hours, but long enough for me to experience an odyssey of being swindled out of $ 40.00 by some people claiming to be airport security. I handed the little girl a dollar. As my cab pulled away a little boy was quickly at my door with his hand out. I can still see their faces.

OffShore has already occurred…

In many organizations, the decision to OffShore has long been made and what remains are only the implementation details. That means that some projects will be brought back to the US, when it is obvious that they cannot be effectively done by an OffShore vendor. In many ways this is reminiscent of the downsizing of organizations, which many Organizational Change professionals regard as less than successful. Yet I have worked in organizations where I wished there would be some downsizing just to eliminate the bureaucracy and shortsighted professionals who don't understand the technology infrastructure well enough to get the job done. I don't like seeing so many U.S. jobs being eliminated, but I also don't believe in a isolationist mentality either. U.S. businesses are OffShoring jobs because they believe that it makes economic sense and that trying to do the work in the U.S. will result in lower profits. While the motives of American Senior Executives have rightfully been questioned in the past, it still remains that OffShore is a trend that is here to stay. Now how do we make it work?

Stop saying yes!

Indian people are incredibly polite. It can be extremely unnerving to work for weeks with colleagues who will simply NEVER disagree with you and will never say NO to anything that you request. Of course that doesn't mean that they will do what you ask. I am learning not to assume that something actually got done as requested. To be honest I am actually enjoying it as well. These exchanges always teach me something about myself. Perhaps I can learn to be a little more polite when I decide that I can't go along with someone else's idea. But in the meantime I must find a way to make certain that my requirements are completely understood and that I know whether or not they have been completed as requested.

Request Tracking

One of my last meetings in New York was to discuss formal request tracking. Technology professionals who sit on trading floors do request tracking (and Software design!) on the bottom of a napkin, using while sipping Shivas Regal (I started at Harry's of Hanover Square with my client, an arbitrageur). OnShore technology professionals need to recognize that their job is changing to focus more on Requirements Specification, Systems Design and Software Quality Assurance. Most of them are trying to find some excuse for why they still need to write code. The Achilles heal of OffShore projects is the lack of effective Requirements and Defect specification and tracking.

Culture Shock…

I am just not used to having someone ask to carry my (heavy) bag for me. Every hour a waiter brings me another (very small) cup of black coffee, since my hosts have figured out that black coffee is just about the only thing that I can have (along with bottled mineral water). I am accompanied to and from my hotel by a colleague and the driver waits outside my hotel. There is no way that I am going to allow a young lady step aside for me to enter a door first. I understand about cultural modesty, but I am still a Jewish-Italian and the idea of servants and cultural classes is very hard for me to understand. My Dad explained that my ancestors (great grandmother) were descendents of Italian royalty in Naples, Italy. Still being in India is an experience of constant cultural shock.

Potential for failure

Organizations are discovering that OffShoring has many pitfalls and potential for failure. One of the most striking is that many Indians are uncomfortable with telling their OnShore clients that they cannot complete a task as requested. They will do ANYTHING to be able to say that they completed their mission. In an admirable way - failure is just not an option. But verbal communication failures are the most serious obstacle to successful OffShore efforts. It's time to implement formal requirements tracking.

Specifying Requirements Tracking

High level business requirements should be then broken down into detailed activities/defects that can be assigned to individual developers. Integrating the requirements tracking system with the CM tool is essential to allow the OnShore managers visibility into exactly what was changed to complete a particular task. The time for formal Requirements Tracking is here and, I believe, the only way that OffShore technology efforts will succeed. I am working on documenting my own process models and observations during this trip. Please drop me a line if you would like to share your ideas and thoughts about successful OffShore processes and methodologies!!!

Bob Aiello is a Senior Editor for Crossroads News and an Associate Director at a major financial services firm in NYC, where he has company wide responsibility for Software Configuration  and Release Management best practices. Bob is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he is also the chair of the CM SIG which meets in Midtown NYC. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra University.

You can reach Mr. Aiello by email at raiello@acm.org

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Write comment