Time Zoned

By William R. Dodson

 

14 June 2002

I hate 7am conference calls. I’m never at my culturally best. And you have to be nice when you’re talking with India. Working across time zones of cross-continental proportions is definitely a project management liability.

 

“What’s the time difference?” my American coworkers called out to the speaker phone. “Nine and a half hours,” the reply crackled back through the receiver. “Why a half?” someone whispered. The co-conspirator shrugged. “For the whole country?” “Yes,” was the echo from across the ocean. It meant a seven o’clock in the morning conference call that everyone in the American office had to make.

 

It was the first information technology project the esteemed insurance company was taking completely offshore, to India. Design and project management were to remain in Boston, in America, but everything else – programming, unit testing, system testing, performance testing – was happening in Bangalore, India. The insurance company had had good luck with its Bangalore partner during the remediation of millions of lines of COBOL programming code during the Y2K scare at the turn of the century. Now, the business wanted to take another step closer to outsourcing the efforts of entire departments it had supported in-house.

 

I recall one of the Indian representatives who worked at the American office. A small, self-effacing fellow with dark rings under his eyes. “Do you live in Boston?” I asked the fellow. “No,” he said with a wane smile. “My family lives in California.” “You must miss them quite a lot,” I said. “Yes, well, I go home every weekend.” I was shocked by the man’s devotion to work and family. His soul was literally strung out across two-thirds of the earth’s surface. He lived across at least fifteen time zones.

 

The 24/7 promise of delivery has meant that corporations have begun ingeniously employing technology to speed up the return on their investments and to hopefully increase the returns. So, now, cars can be designed in Italy, the chassis built in Korea and the accessories developed in America, all pieced together in a maquilladora on the Mexico/U.S. border. Or, software can be designed in America, written in India and tested in China. IBM developed its Beans technology and the Java Beans toolset across four software development groups in five countries: China, India, Belarus and Latvia.

 

Coordination across the time zones then becomes the primary challenge in actually taking advantage of “following the sun.” Coordination includes getting the right resources where they need to be when they’re required, and facilitating communications across the business units. Originally, IBM had centralized project management office (PMO)and quality assurance in Seattle for its Beans project . The PMO required a team that was 30 people large. Eventually, following the sun was so productive an approach that the Seattle PMO – the hub at the center of the spokes – became the bottleneck for passing deliverables back offshore. Eventually, IBM management slimmed the PMO down to three individuals with responsibility for schedule, budget and communications coordination. They delegated design, development and testing responsibilities to the satellite offices, which then increased the amount of communication they had with each other.

 

In my own experience in developing a PMO that facilitated communications and resource allocation that spanned four continents, we met with great success in removing bottlenecks and misunderstandings that were costing efforts around the world mightily. Instead of seeing all of the work that was being done to develop and to implement the software product at client sites as a single product development project, the PMO developed a portfolio of products, much like a mutual fund manager maintains a related yet independent mix of assets.

 

Key to the freer flow of resources and communications was a weekly phone conference I would facilitate between project representatives all over the world. We had all been trained together at a single site before dispersing to the corners of the planet, and had worked with each other in various cities around the world. Being able to picture the faces of the participants made facilitating the conferences far easier, Also, the degree of trust between participants was high because of previous face-to-face contact. Trust made the self-motivated shuffling of resources worldwide easier, so expertise could be had before project risks became unfortunate realities. Occasional teleconferences over satellite links, so we could see one another’s faces, helped sure up the trust that the colleagues were corporeal beings we still enjoyed working with.

 

There was the occasional seven am conference call, but we worked to share the pain and inconvenience across time zones. It helps, then, to dislodge the PMO on occasion, not only so the heart of the project can get closer to some of the projects, but also so that managers can better know its soul: the staff immersed in the world.

 

William R. Dodson is Managing Director of Silk Road Advisors, L.L.C., a management consultancy that builds and improves working relationships across cultures. He is the international business editor of the American Management Association’s (AMA) MWorld Journal of Management, and writes the weekly column “The Cultured Business”, found at www.silkrc.com and at the Global Perspectives section of the AMA’s member website. He can be reached at sradvisors@gmail.com or +1 (847)722-7817.