From Softjourn’s CEO

On the 27th of October, Softjourn CEO, Emmy Gengler, participated on a panel discussion for Armenian technology company CEOs, the Deputy Minister of the Economy and his associates.  Also participating were outsourcing sourcing providers and vendors from Mexico and Poland.

“It was a pleasure to meet everyone and I am very happy to see the growth of the software exports market in Armenia and the excitement of the outsourcing and software vendors” said Emmy.

The event was coordinated by Michelle Messina -  mmessina@explorainternational.com of Explora International. Explora International is focused on assisting international companies to enter the US market.

Softjourn is proud to be sponsoring the next Visibility Conference organized by Right Hand Partners, and to be held on Friday November 7th. If you are looking for financing and looking for a better way to talk with Venture Capitalists about your product, Right Hand Partner’s Visibility Conference may be the way to do it.  MORE INFORMATION

Gallery of Funds Event - If you are an entrepreneur and wish to find out more about what a Venture Capitalist really thinks, the best thing to do is ask them. At the next Gallery of Funds Event sponsored by Softjourn, you will be able to do that.  Tom Dennedy, GP at Artiman Ventures and Brendon Kim, GP at Altos Ventures, both seed stage funds will be answering your questions.  MORE INFO

There has been alot made of  what is called “Second Generation Outsourcing”. For purposes of this discussion, I will use the definition set by the vendor which claims to have pioneered “Second Generation Outsourcing (SGO)”, Anantara Solutions.

In look at how they define “Second Generation Outsourcing”; combining business consulting and IT services. I would like to just ask the question, “How does this differ from the services that for example, IBM, has been providing for years? They used a huge network of specialized vendors to assist in providing services to their clients all of the world. Is this SGO model really any different?

Often I hear from people who have outsourced offshore in the past that the previous team or company they worked with did not meet their expectations. My first question is always then, “What were your expectations?” The most common first reaction I receive is one of surprise, and then an answers range from: “I expected the project to be done on time!” or “I expected them to deliver what I asked for.” At first look these seem like very valid expectations to me, if you engage someone or a company to do a piece of work for you, and you are paying them to do that work, you expect to get it done on time and within the budget that was agreed to. Unfortunately it does not always work that way.

One reason an outsourced team or company may not meet your expectations is how the expectations are set. It is one thing to have a set of expectations that are agreed to at the beginning of a project, and another to look at what goes on during the course of a project. What typically happens on many projects is specs change as the project goes on, even if it is a very short project. Users or project owners see the results as the project goes on and they change their mind on what they want to see, on how they want functions to work, etc. Typically in a fixed bid project, there will be built in some time to allow for potential changes and to give the buyers some leeway. But there is a finite end to the number of changes that will be able to be done in order to meet the original project deadline and to meet the original budget. Change cannot go on forever without one or both of those items being affected. Unfortunately what is often remembered, even if excellent documentation is maintained, when a post-mortem is done, is that the project went outside of the original timeline and outside the budget. It is best if both sides agree that time has to be built in to a fixed bid project to allow for review by users and to undertake the corresponding changes that are always a result of that review; at least x number of days.

Probably both sides; clients and vendors need to do a better job of working together to understand what needs to happen during the course of a project and what the extra time is for, how it is used and what its limitations are; especially where fixed bid projects are concerned.  Often both sides like to rush through the proposal stage and showing the final cost rather than taking the time to understand what the actual project will look like. If the time is taken to understand how the project will work, on both sides, more realistic expectations can be set on both sides and the more likely the results of those expectations will be positive.

The recent edition of Global Services magazine (http://www.globalservicesmedia.com//Dgmag/Aug2008/digimag.html), contained an article on the current state of and developments in the BPO industry in Eastern Europe.

Overall a good and interesting article, unfortunately all of the countries included in the study are now part of the European Union (hence a major mention on increasing costs).  Excluded were countries further east such as Ukraine where BPO is certainly growing as well, especially in the area of insurance claims processing. But other companies are also set up for providing accounting services as well.  

The structure of this book is not new; i.e. one page or a page and a half per idea, but it fits very well for busy managers. I have recommended other books about virtual team management that give ideas that can be quickly implemented, “101 Leadership Actions” is definitely one of those books.  You could pick up the book and open up to almost any page and find and an idea that you can implement in part or in whole for your virtual team, but you probably will not want to go through the book in that manner.   Perusing the table of contents first will tell you where to start. I found the first useful suggestions for my own work with virtual teams in the very first chapter, with something so simple that I can’t believe it I have done it before, or thought of it in such a simple manner. Leadership Action #10, Identify the Benefits of Virtual Teams, in and of itself does not sound new until upon reading further the suggestion is made to have the team itself think of why working virtually is going to make them a better team; why not being co-located is going to make them a better team. Often virtual teams which come together for a specific project may do this type of team start-up process, but think of the virtual team that develops more gradually; most development is done in one US city and then they hire an offshore person who works alone in another country, and then they add another one several months later and so on. These teams often have a harder time of thinking of themselves as virtual and it would be a great quick question to ask during a conference call status meeting, “So what does everyone think the benefits are for our team now that we are virtual?”  It puts the responsibility on everyone to think of what the benefits are, not just the manager.  Some suggestions that are made that will be helpful are actual helpful for any type of team, not just a virtual team, such as # 18 – Regularly redesign your meeting structure. Which suggests moving the team agenda around so those persons who speak always at the beginning of a meeting know they can tune out after their turn, or those who always speak at the end can sleep during the first half of the meeting. It is a great and simple suggestion to shake things up once a while so people stay awake.   To give you an idea of the number of actions which you may find useful from this book, below is a chart of the number of actions I thought I could put to use or put to better use within the teams that I manage:     

 The result is that I found 16% of the actions immediately useful, not bad for a book that took maybe a couple of hours to read. You may find more or less similar results.  Note #80 and #86 are two very useful actions which I continually stress to managers of virtual teams and they cannot be repeated often enough; #80 – Make the Transition from Managing Time to Managing Projects and #86 – Use the Phone More Often.  I would recommend this book to anyone managing a virtual team as a good resource which will provide immediate ideas that can be incorporated to make your virtual team run better.     

101 Leadership Actions for Creating and Managing Virtual Teams
By Ollie Malone, Ph.D
Copyright © 2004

We at Softjourn would like to say Congratulations to our CEO, Emmy B. Gengler, who recently earned her Certified Outsourcing Professional (COP) credentials from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP)!

In order to earn a COP a candidate has to complete a series of work involving and/or taking a Masters class in Outsourcing, completing a series of case studies and answering a series of outsourcing questions. All work completed is reviewed by a committee including current staff many of the biggest outsourcing firms such as Accenture, IBM, Infosys, etc. Demonstrating actual work in outsourcing is a further requirement to gain a COP. Practical work must be described as it relates to various outsourcing components and then must be approved by the client or manager who requested the outsourcing work and then again approved by the COP approval committee of the IAOP. Up to five years of work experience can be used to demonstrate expertise in outsourcing. Candidates for the COP can take up to 18 months to document and finish all written requirements for their credentials.

Congratulations Emmy!

Jeff Kreuser
President
Softjourn, Inc.

This is my favorite offshoring Best Practice.  Be Flexible! 

When will you find the need to be flexible?  During all of the times that I mentioned in the previous 8 Best Offshoring Practices. You will have to be flexible with the times of day you work, with the type of work you do offshore versus on-shore, with the type of communication methodologies you will have to be flexible (plus have a few options prepared in case the first one falls through).

In the end working offshore should not mean so many differences that the practice of completing a software development project is unrecognizable. Much of the process will be familiar to you; at first it may seem just not as “comfortable” due to the different times of day you find yourself working, or the means you are using to communicate (web conference tool) versus face-to-face, etc. But just like anything else, the more you do it, and that means every day, the more used to it you become and the more flexible you are the more you will find the method that works right for you, for your projects and for your company. 

Maybe you have heard this in your company, or thought it yourself, “It takes a heroic effort every time to bring the project in when we do it offshore!” Now some people thrive in the high stress of having to solve a lot of problems at the last minute, or having to work 40 hours straight, but for most of us, we will not do our best work at those times.

You have to monitor an offshore project, just like you would any other project.  Continual deliverables work the best so that you can limit the number of surprises at the end. Nothing is going to require a heroic effort like throwing a project over the wall and not checking in on it for 4 months when you actually need the final project. Not just accepting the answer, “everything is okay”, without actually seeing some results, will also help prevent the need for heroic efforts at the end.

Put an appropriate monitoring system in place, the same as you would if the project was in house and let it work for you. It may not always eliminate the need for an extra push at the end of the project, but it should give you more confidence in the results that you are going to get. 

While not news for many of us, much of what is driving the developments in Collaboration and the developments in collaboration tools is the necessity to create a Virtual Team space (VTS).  Early in the book the authors define 10 trends in collaboration, the most interesting to me is the trend which they call, “Presence Everywhere” – which means being able to detect which involves basically being able to quickly find a person whether they are online or on the phone or in a conference room. A typical scenario as to when this may be useful is given (and I am sure a familiar one to everyone); A and B are working together via web conference and they need C to help solve an issue. Typically one or both A and B will be looking through their buddy lists to see if C is available online, if not both may try calling C via various numbers; office, cell, etc., and if they are finally successful in finding C it may take several clicks of sending links to bring C in to the web conference. IBM is working on their Sametime product to have this type of capability to reach external contacts. LiteScape also apparently has ways to detect the availability of users not only via instant messenger buddy lists but also from your list of outlook contacts and detect their presence via mobile devices.

If you were not already familiar with the term, the book introduces you to “mashups” as another trend in collaboration. A mashup is the process of creating a hybrid application built from data or functionality found across a number of different applications. An example of this can be seen in a site listing real estate, for example, which uses a 3rd party site or application to provide information about criminal activity in or around the house which is for sale.

There is no shortage of collaboration tools which the book introduces you to such as TimeBridge which can help you schedule meetings faster, but a great part of the book is the emphasis on the human aspect of collaboration. As they say, collaboration is 10% tools and 90% people.
The second half of the book takes a look at the human side of collaboration with chapter 7 specifically focusing on virtual teams. A very good point is made at the beginning of the chapter that the challenge has traditionally been how to minimize diversity among the people on teams whereas the key in the future will be to embrace the differences and work with them. I agree with this whole heartedly and would extend this to all aspects of working in a distributed manner, for example – time differences, location differences, etc.

Chapters 8 through 14 also focus on different aspects of people and processes. A lot of what was written was review on how teams work, it will most likely be review for a lot of people. What I found funny was, for example in Chapter 9 on Interpersonal communication, the author mentions how important Mirroring/Identifying is in building report, but he doesn’t go in to the next step of how you do this when using collaboration tools.

Chapter 15 is supposed to bring it all together; the human side and the technology side, but I found it a bit lacking. It talked more about the different stages a company may be at in using collaboration tools, and why they may have problems implementing them, but it did not seem to go that step further and talk about how to overcome the actual road blocks to working with distributed teams and actually using the technology. 

In general this is what I thought was lacking in the book overall; actual examples or case studies of the use of tools and use of team interaction processes to overcome problems. On pg. 194, the authors discuss the work of one of their clients, and I agree it is an excellent example of an operational agreement between two distinct agencies. There is a lot of detail there, however, there are very few other real life examples given in the book. Adding additional examples and case studies, which I have no doubt the authors must have from their consulting practices, would have made the book much stronger. 

My first thought with this book is that it is especially good for larger companies which are working with a number of collaboration tools, or looking to implement them. However, chapters 1 through 6 which relate to the different technologies that are available, as well as the appendixes listing a number of different technologies, can also be very interesting for smaller firms which are often working virtual from the very start of their existence. As well, for most anyone who reads this book, unless you are a study of collaboration tools you will most likely be surprised at the wide range of tools available and perhaps at what is considered collaboration technology. As far as functionaries who will appreciate this book; marketing folks can certainly get a number of ideas for tools that they can use to do their jobs better, software engineering folks, and anyone who has to deal with remote teams on a daily or almost daily basis will benefit from reading this book. 

Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World
Authors:  David Coleman and Stewart Levine
Published: January 2, 2008