The Advisor Role for Operations Manager / Director
A 600-person team, evenly distributed in 14 countries was developing a cohesive set of customer-facing order applications for a Fortune 50 company. The team was poor at estimating risk, causing numerous late deliverables and burnout when heroic global efforts prevented. Resentment increased when schedule crashes meant that Asian and European team members were forced to share more than a “fair burden of the pain” with middle-of-the-night conference calls.
The organization has an “email culture” and felt burdened to stay online to “catch” remote team members when they were available on instant messenger. But global team members were strongly divided, by region, about the effectiveness and appropriateness of IM for different types of tasks.
Global Online Software Development Organization
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| The Perfect Equation |
The Result |
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To improve productivity in a distributed global environment, a few global communication standards were implemented. To measure individual and organizational effectiveness in using email globally, to facilitate the engineering process, a 26-question survey was developed based on the work of Martha Haywood, and audits distributed communication maturity. The survey tests behaviors and practices integral to four principles of successful globally distributed teams:
Setting and respecting standards for availability and acknowledgement.
- Sender-prioritized communication.
- The ability to replace lost context.
- Time spent in synchronous communication.
Team managers' ability to identify, estimate and resolve conflict and risk coincided with country-of-origin and type of communication tool used. Focus groups were held to identify possible causes and effects of different behaviors.
Small peer networks were established to develop strategies and actions that could rapidly impact performance.
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The team developed on-boarding for globally distributed team members specific to the organization culture, customer communication preferences, and the distributed software development process. Diversity Interactive multimedia case studies were used on an ad-hoc basis to provoke discussion leading to decisions about shared values, processes, and standards. Team members developed a sensitivity to the practical and cultural implications of using IM for different task types in Europe, Asia and the U.S.
To improve team member ability to estimate response time, team members developed simple practices for availability and acknowledgement. Team members reported an increased ability to prioritize remote requests, and a reduction in the number of emails received.
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Global Engineering Learning & Development Tools
Benchmark Analytics
Custom Studies
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