Does this sound familiar to you: Outsourcing offshore can only work if I am up the same hours that they are, otherwise nothing gets done! Or from the offshore side you may here, They never want to come in early and talk with us, we always have to adjust our schedule. One of the best things you can accept early on when working with many offshore locations is that there will be time differences. The sooner you accept it as a fact of life, the sooner you will start to look for how this can benefit you and your company!
Certainly anyone can understand that separating tasks like testing in one location and software development in another location can provide benefit, such that overnight unit testing can be done in one location and in the morning the other side can pick up its development work fixing the bugs reported by the testing team.
Time differences can also be to your advantage if one side is doing 1st level customer support and another region is doing 3rd level customer, for example. It is even possible to share this type of work; bugs which need more research can be worked on continuously.
But the time differences can even work to your advantage when both sides are working on the same project; even an agile development team of five persons; four software developers + 1 QA tester with 3 of the developers in one location and one developer and a QA tester in another location. Or even more than two locations, a team can make this work and make progress faster. Let’s an issue comes up, not sure how to solve it; work does not have to stop, one side can continue trying to solve the issue overnight, and the other side can keep it going the next morning. Two years ago, Fortune magazine used a great example of a far-flung work force making it working on continuous development of the same product, MySQL. Today MySQL has 400 employees working in more than 25 countries, over 70% of whom work from home. Part of what probably made this work right from the beginning is that MySQL is an open source product and it started with a culture of individuals all over the world who believed in the product and wanted to work on improving, and improving what others did to the production, and they wanted to do it right from their homes. MySQL did not have to try and change its culture to work in many locations; it was that way from day one. Many companies do not have that luxury; the culture of the organization has to change to be accepting of working with many locations. But once that difference is accepted time difference can be an advantage to getting work done faster.
The point is that the time difference will be there no matter what, so you need to make it work for you! Be flexible and be creative, time does not have to be the enemy.