My colleagues in India are extremely polite and apologetic about calling me so early. I am tempted to joke that I had to get up to answer the phone anyway, but I realize that sometimes humor does not translate well. They all speak English although at times, I have no idea what they saying. Accents and cultural expectations can make communication very difficult. I am beginning to recognize if someone is from Bombay or Chennai by how they speak English. Since I have started trying to learn Hindi, I appreciate how difficult it is to communicate in another language and I am certainly not about to complain that they don't speak English well. At least one of my students clearly did not master the material required to use ClearCase successfully and I feel that this was largely due to the language barrier. I have made a note to myself that when I visit India I will ask this person to take the class again. This time I will enlist the other students (who all speak Hindi and Urdu) to help me translate. This approach to teaching is not new to me. Many of my students from the former Soviet Union also had difficulty learning the material, but from work as a volunteer EMT, I speak enough Russian to sometimes switch languages. I have also found that getting another student to help translate is a great way to teach in a multilingual environment.

Shaking side to side…

Language can be verbal or physical body language. The first time that a student began emphatically shaking his head side to side, I thought that he was objecting to what I saying. Given that I know the internals of a ClearCase vob better than most of the support people at IBM/Rational I found this odd. It was a few minutes later that I realized that this body language was meant to convey something completely different. It really meant that the student was agreeing with me and acknowledging that he understood!! There really is a significant clash in how we communicate both verbally and through our physical body language.

Stop saying yes!

Many of my students will not express verbally that they disagree with me regardless of what they really think. This again seems to be an interesting cultural norm. I have been raised to question and challenge everything in life and I just can't adjust to someone who agrees with me because of my "perceived position" as an instructor. At times I feel like some of colleagues are saying yes (because they can't imagine confronting me) and then doing something entirely different!! Is this passive aggression (sorry for the "psychobabble" - my MA is in Industrial Psychology!) or just a culturally normal way of coping with my requests that they feel cannot be met. My culture as an aggressive New Yorker (of European decent) is clearly not in alignment with my colleagues from India. When I am not banging my head on the wall I am actually enjoying the challenge of communicating and trying to get results in this culturally challenging situation. I also see a value to this cultural challenge. I have had to learn to be more clear about my requests that I have ever been before!! This clash of communicating creates many problems in trying to implement global CM Solutions.

In search of answers…

In a few hours I am on a plane to Israel. In a few weeks I am scheduled to visit India. Israelis don't have quite so much trouble being direct (as compared to many people from India). I don't want to get into making sweeping generalizations (that will probably turn out to be incorrect anyway!), but I do want to explore the issue of what does OffShore and the Globalization of IT really bring to the table. What core competencies do OffShore vendors offer technology professionals like myself? Which tasks are most suited to be sent to an OffShore vendor and which ones should stay at the customer site? Right now, I can't imagine OffShoring User Acceptance testing or Business Requirements gathering.

Lessons from Y2K

I remember sending thousands of Cobol programs from NYC to Israel to be made Y2K compliant. The Israeli vendor had some great tools to make these changes quickly and easily. What's more none of our NYC Cobol programmers wanted to get stuck with the drudgery of this work. It truly was a win-win example of effectively implementing an OffShore solution.

Meeting with vendors…

As I meet with vendors next week I am going to ask them about the core competencies that their company offers. What Knowledge, Skills and Abilities does their firm bring to the table that we all might benefit from. Most people think of OffShore as just being the commodity of cheap labor. I think that this is misguided. It's becoming abundantly clear that many IT and software development tasks should not be OffShored. I think that we have to be smarter about this choice. OffShore vendors have handled setting up World wide CM repositories and developed processes to track requirements and Software Development LifeCycles that impact developers working in different parts of the world. WIth Y2K we had processes to successfully build a release BEFORE it was sent OffShore and we would not accept it back unless it once again built successfully. Then tested it thoroughly!

Your ideas and issues…

I am starting to develop my list of question and issues that I wish to discuss with OffShore vendors. What questions would you like to see us address in upcoming articles? On a technical level I am interesting in learning about the use of Citrix Metaframe for managing OffShore development (versus having to build a second OffShore development and testing environment). On a process level I am interested in which tasks are best OffShored and which ones should stay OnShore. How can developers manage development of the same body of code from two remote locations (e.g. NYC & India). From a human perspective I am most interested in how we can all communicate and cooperate more effectively. I am learning a lot about myself and what I value from the project. It's interesting to think that traveling to Israel and India may ultimately teach us a great deal about how we all need to work back here in New York City. The implementation of future CM solutions (e.g. Global Software Development) may well be greatly impacted by the success of our efforts with the OffShore and Global IT revolution!!!

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

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