#2 Ignoring Timezone Differences - 10 Ways to Fail at Outsourcing

In what is perhaps THE MOST CRUCIAL and FAILURE CAUSING item on this list, many forget that software development is HARD WORK and requires real-time collaboration much of the time. Regardless of the improvements in VOIP, development platforms, and people's willingness to start early and work late, the rip in communications caused by time zone differences is practically immeasurable. Just look at how many hours India and the US are separated.


The working hour overlap is NILL between San Francisco and Bangalore for example. Click on the image to plan your meetings with another time zone.

With the old Waterfall project management styles you would find that a team in the US would need to write out every minute detail of what the application should do and how it should function and deal with every contingency in advance so documents could be turned over to the development team to work on and whalah, overnight you will have working software. Didn't happen that way.

Some Indian companies are adopting Agile project management. Yahoo! This will improve the expectations factor but still communicating will be quite difficult.

What ultimately will need to happen is 1) the Indian team will need to work odd hours to communicate with the US team and 2) visit the US periodically to close communication gaps, while the 3) US team will need to visit the Indian team 3-4 times a year to deal with attrition, team morale issues, and productivity problems. Each time someone visits another 2-4 days are lost in travel time and jet lag, not to mention families destroyed because of all the travel. And each trip will cost a minimum of $2000 for airfare and hotel, etc.

In all outsourcing cases each team should visit the other but with greater physical distance, comes greater communication gaps and higher expenses. Ultimately this leads to a higher Total Cost of Engagement, which is NOT reflected in the rate per hour. Those who makes their decisions primarily based on the hourly rate deserve to lose sleep.

All of this points to doing business with nearshore providers to take advantage of the cultural similarities and cost savings. Did we mention that Mexico is a great location for application development outsourcing?

Back to: 10 Ways to Fail at Outsourcing