Managing Offshore IT

Most of us in the offshoring space have seen our fair share of challenges, including those of team dynamics, teams beginning to get dysfunctional. For this discussion, it would be appropriate to look at the case Hazra articulates: “In a recent large IT sourcing engagement, the client's senior leadership team encountered this dilemma. This client has employed multiple sourcing vendors for the past ten years, and it has reorganized its own IT organizations a few times. During this process of transformational change, it lost a number of key employees. To complicate things further, over a period of three years, this company has acquired five small companies with niche expertise -- two of them augmenting business functions and the other three being small IT firms specializing in infrastructure and information systems support services. In addition, three years ago, senior management decided to outsource all of its application development to an offshore vendor, formalizing a relationship that treated the vendor as a primary IT partner. These ongoing changes in the IT organization have had a tremendous impact on its ability to deliver tangible results to its business counterparts. It has also had a negative impact on the culture of the IT organization: employees and consultants have a tense relationship with the prime vendor (the offshore partner). There have been several incidents of miscommunication and noncooperation among various teams, as well as a lack of trust among various teams and individual team members. A set of political impediments is also evident at the senior management level. Overall, this company can be considered a dysfunctional work environment.”

I think this case is a great example of “Dysfunctional Work Environment,” for which Hazra provides seven steps for managers and executives to consider. I will not repeat Hazra's analysis in the blog though I like the way he summarizes, stating “The problem does not go away by ignoring it. To resolve a problem, we need a positive attitude -- and we need a lot of it to make teamwork and collaboration happen in a dysfunctional work environment.”

The seven steps Hazra talks about in the research note cover most dimensions; however, there is an additional ‘softer side.’ One could also argue that software teams become dysfunctional because managers fail to recognize the potential of leveraging the “software culture” [This is a topic I had also examined further in my book] My research takes off from Prof. Erran Carmel's viewpoint “Software professionals worldwide belong to the computer subculture…Software guru Larry Constantine argues that the computer subculture is stronger than national culture and that the programmer in Moscow is more similar to his American programming peer than to other Russians…. Engineers, like software professionals, place high value of on work and on achievement and relatively low value on social relationships.”

Footnote: though challenges of managing globally distributed teams are inherent in the ‘flattening world;’ the practices you and I adopt in the field will determine the success of our initiatives.