Culture and Offshoring
It is a good idea to do some research into the culture norms of your future, offshored development team to ensure they can mesh well with your existing team.
During the pre-dot.com days of the 90’s, a number of large software developers set up offshore development farms in India. When I was International Sales Manager at Qualcomm’s Eudora division, Qualcomm was pursuing this with some vigor - trying to keep up with the likes of Sun and Microsoft who already had interests in India. This strong pursuit by large market players motivated a great number of Indian entrepreneurs to develop offshore development companies.
I already was very familiar with offshoring but from a different perspective - my first company in Japan worked closely with Japanese developers, who in turn would sometimes work with remote Chinese or American programmers. Since then, Ive been involved in many overseas development projects in Eastern Europe and Proactive International has a significant number of employees there.
Software vendors that are new to offshoring frequently run into communication problems that go well beyond a mastery of the English language. Two top issues are poor accommodation and mismatched problem solving methods.
Poor accommodation refers to how each party tries to accommodate their own sense of a successful relationship. For example, western companies generally take contracts very seriously and besides the required boilerplate incorporate specifics which are critical to the business relationship; yet many Asian companies will sign contracts hoping that a future ongoing relationship will be negotiated along the way.
Mismatched problem solving methods refers to cultural preferences for solving problems - not necessarily relationship problems - but solving problematic tasks in development. Because there are significant cost savings in offshoring, there is an economic tendency to throw more people at a problem. Then there are cultural problem solving methods to consider. There is a cultural tendency in Asiatic countries to throw more people at a problem and find highly stable solutions based on consensus. On the other hand, there is a highly competitive maverick mentality among developers in Post Soviet countries that is the polar opposite. Which is a better match for interfacing with your internal team?
