Seven pillars of wisdom on Product Development in a Global Setup

Following is a compiled set of insights which we have gathered as a result of my successful experience with managing Product Development in a Global Setup for the past 10+ years.

This is a collective wisdom generated as a result of discussion with peers and mentors, some amount of trial and errors, learning from success and failures and mulling over observations on teams which have been highly effective in dealing with Offshore Product development as well as teams which have been a disaster on this front.

The following aspects play a significant role in crossing the chasm of effective Product Development in a Global Setup.

• Plan your offshore product development program : There is a big difference between offshore development by choice and offshore development by compulsion. The CxO needs to communicate the vision and ensure buy-in by all stake holders. They should also make sure that the virtues are affectively cascaded downwards by highlighting the increase in the size of the pie. The engineering head needs to assess the competencies of the teams and then allocate work according to competencies.

 

• Embibe the feeling of “One team”, mutual trust and rapport : Build trust amongst the team members across the globe. The communication needs to be inclusive and open. Face to face meeting and discussions help a lot. The managers need to make sure they foster the feeling of one team and encourage the team members to communicate and resolve difference of opinions at the earliest.

 

• Work partitioning, Clarity in roles and responsibilities : Lack of a clear model here will lead to chaos and chrisis. An adhoc model will be at the mercy of compatible and mature interface pairs across the globe. A clear and well articulated model motivates the team and increases opearational efficiency. The model needs to be aligned with business objectives and this needs to be communicated across the teams.

 

• Balanced Organization structure : A balanced pyramid of skillset and experience profile at each site is very important in global software development. It is important to match the nature of the work to be done while staffing up the team. As the offshore team matures, it becomes prudent to add ancillary roles like documentation, program management, technical product management, etc.

 

• Communication : It is impossible to over communicate in a global software development setup. Continous information sharing helps build trust and ensures timely action. The teams should leverage technology and tools ( emails, audio/video conferencing, net-meeting, webcasts, Instant messanger, Blogs, Wiki, etc. ) to exchange information. The communication should focus on cross site information needs like project status, design changes, decisions taken, etc.  The teams need to formalize the response times, escalation paths and issue resolution mechanisms.

 

• Project planning and management : Project planning and management plays a very critical role in a global product development setup. In a local setup, face to face interactions can cover up for limitations of immature models.  Processes need to be documented and more importantly, utilized.  People should used a metrics based approach to drive project scope, quality and risk management decisions at various levels. Lessons learnt from past projects should be disseminated to other projects.

 

• Strong Management team : Management style is very important  to the success of product development in a global setup. It can make or break the organizational health of the setup. Successful managers would adopt their management style depending on the situation as the local teams would have the shared context. They would also fine tune it based on different team dynamics and the talent pool profile. Issues which the team managers and leaders would need to handle would be in various dimensions like
• Technical : improper work distribution, inadequate and inconsistent engineering documentation, delays in freezing/fixing specs, heterogeneous development environments
• Project Management : improper planning, inadequate tracking and poor risk management
• Communication : improper information and knowledge sharing, lack of responses, fuzzy interfaces
• People : Lack of team dynamics, confidence and trust
• Management : Micromanagement, lack of distributed management experience