Virtual Team Case Study

Industry

Financial – Payment Service Provider

The Client

A major client out of California, United States Of America

The Challenge

To develop an offshore team that would work as an extension of the onshore team. The main challenge was to overcome the boundaries of time, distance, communication and language.

The Solution

The Offshore team Structure and processes were developed to ensure the successful completion of the project. The major challenges were managed through flexibility and better hiring. In addition a dedicated time of about a week was set aside initially to set up the same environment at the offshore delivery center. This ensured that both the teams were working in similar environments and with similar software versions. This led to minimal integration issues.

Time & Distance:

The time difference between the onshore and offshore team was exactly 12 hours. This allowed for follow the Sun policy to be implemented but at the same time the problem arouse by both the teams not having any overlap of working hours. This issue was handled by establishing solid overlap times between the teams. Where by the offshore team would stay in late while the onshore team would come in early on certain specified dates. The tasks were broken down and assigned to the offshore team. Further progress was managed and monitored through the weekly progress report which was circulated to all the stakeholders. The progress report is detailed enough and includes all the elements (items achieved, pending and scheduled) of past week and the next week.  

During the important and critical stages of the project, the onsite team member was also available for about an hour during his night time either on the phone or on online Chat. 

Offshore Team Structure

  1. Project Manager: Responsible for communication, team assignments, project planning at offshore center, deliverables and progress report generation.
  2. Project team members: responsible for deliverables according to the requirements set out and the quality standards built into the system. 

Deliverable Management:

Version Management tool was used at the offshore center. The code dumps were dropped off at the customer server with release notes. Each release was tested by the onshore team and any bugs etc were reported and fixed accordingly. The application was concurrently developed both by onsite and offsite teams. The requirement specifications of the task for the offshore team and the technical architecture of the complete application was sent to the offshore team. Based on which we developed the technical design and coded the application.  

The development process of this application had certain synchronization check points. At each check point the changes of onsite application were reflected into the offsite development environment and vice versa. This ensured seamless integration at time of delivery for UAT / Production. 

Communication:

The communication was done through voice conversations, email and internet chat utilities. These three modes ensured that the teams both on shore and offshore worked as a single cohesive unit. A regular progress report was circulated to all the stakeholders every Monday by the offshore project manager. This progress report is detailed and all the actions in the previous week and coming week are clearly mentioned with each milestone is clearly defined and the responsibility was assigned. In future we plan to implement a VOIP phone system which would allow us further integration with the onshore team through unlimited voice communication capability.  

Language:

The offshore team constitutes of resources that have had at least a 4 years Bachelors of Computer Science degree. The medium of instruction in these institutes is English, which basically means that all the resources are highly conversant in both spoken and written English. We put a particular emphasis on the communication skills during hiring process. This is to ensure that we provide prime services to our customers in North America and other English Speaking nations. The project managers generally have experience of working with International Clients either onsite or offsite. This particular quality allowed us to overcome the language barrier to a level where it never was mentioned or considered an issue.  

Key Benefits 

Follow the Sun Strategy:

The client has an almost perfect 24 hour working cycle established. The offshore team starts work right about when the onshore team leaves office. Working in conjunction the teams were able to provide highly integrated and solid software solutions. This model offers an inherent economic advantage to the customer.  

Skill Set Compatibility:

All the advantages are gained without compromising on the experience and skill set of the technical resources. Skill set compatibility basically ensured complete control over the project and the quality of the deliverable. The skilled resources are available in abundance and skill set availability and compatibility was not an issue. Hence offshore team with similar skill set but lower cost was established, which offered the enterprise higher economic benefits from each of its software projects.  

Time to market:

A faster time to market has been achieved through the use of the extended development team model. The customer has seen benefits in the shape of taking products to market faster resulting in business benefits by going to market first and the savings through the use of offshore team. The lower offshore cost allows the customer to put more bodies on the project within the given budget and at the same time the working day is extended. Providing a dual advantage to organizations.  

Work in the 4th Generation Offshore Outsourcing model, by moving far beyond the established onsite/offsite model and adding to it the offer of an in-depth local consulting presence through the customer’s business resources which are part of the onsite team. The onsite team focus’s on the customers business applications, and works with the customers management to ensure successful project and happy customer  

Cost Savings

  1. Lower per hour cost of the offshore technical resources
  2. No cost of facilities to be incurred
  3. No cost for ramp up of the team, the customer was able to manage the peak time easily
  4. Pay as you use model, allowed the customer to ramp up and down the team according to the requirements. Providing flexibility and minimum strain on the organization
  5. No additional HR cost like provident fund, health insurance etc. All of these were the responsibility of the offshore partner. Hiring issues were non-existent. Once the team member planned to leave it was the responsibility of the offshore partner to provide a resource with comparable skill set and experience. 

Scalability:

Due to the abundance of talent and skilled personnel at competitive rates, it is much easier to ramp up the team size according to the requirements. This has provided our customer with the advantage to using additional resources at short notices and with out the hassle of any additional HR issues.