Global product development is today's reality. Costs of offshore product development are a fraction of US costs. For example, experienced and highly-educated offshore software development is advertised as low as $15 an hour! USA Today reports that India alone has a $7.8 billion software-export business. But since global development is tricky, here are three critical ideas...

Clarity...

We have known several teams that have been disappointed with offshore development. They have usually been surprised when the delivered product was not what they thought they had specified. We attribute this to unclear or underspecified requirements.

When developing a product with a small team in a single physical location, teams can often write sketchy requirements and fill in the gaps through hallway discussions, shared culture and common background. When the team is 6000 miles and 12 time zones removed, the requirements have to be much clearer. For an overseas-developed product of moderate complexity, plan on spending 2 to 6 times the effort on written requirements than you might spend on a local project.

More on requirements...

Communications...

We advise that your offshore team contacts should be certified fluent in your business's local language. If you choose a remote team that cannot operate in your language, you are greatly increasing your chances of failure. This is even true if you have a local technical team member who is a native speaker of their language. Additionally, insist that all documentation be written in your native language.

Verbal communication is challenging even if the offshore team is fluent in your native language. Our guideline is to over-explain content by 50% for all verbal and written material. That level of clarification will help to insure that the receiver understands 100% of your message.

Project Management is also subject to the 50% over-communicate challenge for every element of the project plan. For initial projects we recommend that the lead project manager visit the development team either monthly or a minimum of six times during the project.

More on project communications...

Collaboration...

Collaboration tools are making offshore development easier and more affordable. While collaborative tools don't replace the power that personal acquaintance has on the success of a project, they reduce the time spent traveling and provide powerful platforms to facilitate meetings and to jointly manage project plans and documents.

The collaborative tools market is huge with hundreds of companies providing exciting options. This link provides an introduction to how these tools can help to assure your project success if your team is distributed around the world or across an atrium.

More on collaborative tools...

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