Companies engaging in software outsourcing/offshoring, or that have distributed software engineering teams, tackle a variety of challenges related to the distributed aspects of their operation. Through some combination of collaboration tools, technologies, processes, T&E $s, lots of late night conference calls, etc., they work towards managing through these challenges and experience varying degrees of success with their projects. And they do that while striving to reduce overall engineering costs (the key objective for most of them).
Of the challenges they face in coordinating software engineering projects across distributed environments (and there are many), I believe that time zone difference is the most significant. You can save money, find great talent and implement the most effective platform and process for collaboration and software development -- but not being able to reach people when you need to still makes a difference in the 'velocity' and effectiveness of your development/delivery lifecycle.
While this was not the key factor influencing our decision to establish teams in South America, we certainly have benefited tremendously from it. With teams in Chile, Peru and Brazil, our teams (or individuals) have never been more than six time zones away. This means that throughout the year, there is always a core window available for us to collaborate. Of course, this does not mean that we are in constant hourly contact. In fact, I spend an average of an hour a day on such communication. It simply means that people are more accessible and therefore there are more opportunities for direct (or synchronous) communication, brainstorming, etc.
While most people address this issue through a lot of after hour calls as well as relying on local management teams, we have had to do neither. Having to hire offshore management team to look over local operations obviously adds to the overall costs. We have hired and managed individuals directly, maintained a flat team structure, regular work hours, and implemented a number of different agile techniques towards the development of our platform and solutions. Given that we are implementing leading-edge technologies, the model has worked very effectively for us -- both in the development of our products but also during deployment with our first customer.
All this without compromising on the cost benefit or talent. In our case, we have a significant edge on both fronts.
So time zones matter.
-Sanjiva, Oct 2008
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