Across the hall / Across the Globe Project Management: Challenges for globally distributed teams

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Across the hall / Across the Globe Project
ManagementChallenges for globally distributed
teams

• Vikas Sehgal
• vsehgal_at_projistics.com
• Projistics
• San Jose, CA

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Gartner says

• By 2004 60 of professional and management tasks
  at Global 1000 companies will be by virtual
  teams.
• By 2003 50 of virtual teams will fail to meet
  strategic / operational objectives.

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Agenda

• Why distributed teams?
• Challenges
• Risks
• Possible approach
• Case study Lexware / Intuit

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Vikas Sehgal

• 10 years experience working in distributed teams
• Co-Founded Nagarro an offshore software
  services company
• Co-Founder and President of Projistics a
  software suite of tools for managing project
  lifecycle.

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Why distributed teams

• Cost saving
• Availability of talent
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Projects span across company boundaries (ex
  Projects with remote partners or customers)

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What you loose

• Ad-hoc meetings
• Water cooler discussions
• Radio corridor
• Whiteboard
• Socializing

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Challenges

• Distance
• Communication costs
• Connectivity
• Reduced face-to-face interaction
• Different time zones
• Cultural
• Language

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Project Risks

• Inaccurate progress tracking
• Team conflict more personal than professional
• Lack of trust
• Technology and tools to choose
• Security / IPR

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More Project Risks

• Creating a shared sense of purpose / goal / team
  spirit
• Build vision through leadership
• Sense of community / identity
• Cannot get emotional tone in communications

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Case Study Lexware / Intuit

• Project Objective Help Lexware develop the
  German version of QuickBooks
• Locations
• San Jose, CA
• Edmonton, Canada
• Freiburg, Germany
• New Delhi, India

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Lexware - challenges

• Quickbooks source code more than 2 GB
• Language German variables, comments
• Time zone working across 4 different time zones

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Communication

• Define your communication channels
• Define frequency of communication
• Maintain minutes of the meetings, action item
  lists, red flags

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QuickBooks 2003 (released July, 2002)
Intuit,Canada
Lexware, Germany
Nagarro, Germany
Nagarro,India
Domain knowledge transfer Ger/Aus tax systems,
Euro rules, VAT
Requirements
Initial/basic functional queries
Day-to-day functional queries
UK-Canada codebase
UK-Canada codebase Ger/Aus codebase
Requirements USD
Code update / sync baselines
Development
Day-to-day technical queries
Escalated technical queries
Day-to-day technical queries
Weekly status updates
Test plans
Bugs, QA
Test plan review
Test results
Bug assignment
Patches/bug fixes
Billing, Satisfaction
Timesheets
Issue resolution, escalation
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Time zone

• The nightmare of scheduling a conference call
  with people in four different time zones.
• Overlapping workdays
• Collaborative time is reduced by a union of
  holidays

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Business Processes
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Micromanage Locally

• Dont even try to micro-manage remotely
• Distributed teams need distributed project
  management
• Single, responsible point of contact at each
  location

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Share Knowledge

• Build knowledge repositories
• Make them easily available
• Make sure everyone contributes

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IM

• Instant communication saves time
• Faster than email
• Less intrusive than phone
• IM and security enterprise IM solutions

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Intranet/Extranet/EverythingNet

• Browser is king
• All information available through Intranet /
  Extranet
• Firewall issues / VPN / Security
• Knowledge bases accessible through the Intranet

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Project Methodology

• Choose the methodology wisely
• Waterfall good for large projects with
  well-defined goals
• Rapid prototyping (Evolutionary Lifecycle) good
  for rapidly changing requirements
• Spiral good for risk minimization

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Manage Change

• Define policies / procedures to manage change
• Document every change
• Evaluate change and define impact of the change
  and configuration items affected
• Approval and workflow process
• Automatic task creation and linked back to change

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Risk Management and Mitigation

• What Risk ???
• Identify risks early on in the project
• Devise mitigation plans
• Review risks during the project based on current
  state of project

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Deliverable Management

• Use a result oriented approach
• Identify clearly definable and verifiable
  deliverables
• Communicate deadline slippages well in advance
• Document everything

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Tools

• Use integrated solutions
• Workflow for business process automation
• Task management and prioritization
• Change Management
• Risk Management
• Issue tracking and automatic routing
• Customizable
• Delegated administration

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Questions?
Across the hall / Across the Globe Project
ManagementChallenges for globally distributed
teams

• Vikas Sehgal
• vsehgal_at_projistics.com
• Projistics
• San Jose, CA