Monday, 31 March 2014

Managing Globally Distributed Teams

Below I have outlined my notes and reviews from this weeks reading on managing globally distributed teams.

Krishna et al. (2004) Managing Cross-Cultural Issues in Global Software Outsourcing. Communications of the ACM. 47(4), 62-66

Problems faced when outsourcing IT software inlucde having to deal with distinct ways of working & cultural adaption.

How can these cross-cultural difficulties of global software outsourcing relationships be addressed?

1. Strategic choice of projects
  • Projects e.g. Software that is embedded in the operating system or middleware does not require cultural understanding
  • Learning
2. Managing the relationship
  • Common systems & common processes can be used to do this
  • Very difficult to harmonize major differences in norms and values, this is evident from the examples given, both of which I found to be very interesting;
The first example was of difficulties between Indian and British programmers. The British were very upfront about crticism in face to face meetings but the Indians would not voice criticism face-to-face and instead send it in an email afterwards, hence frustrating the british!

Also there was an example of Germans and Japanese working together, they both had different views on "after-hours" working but achieved a negotiated culture whereby the Japanese began to work a little less and the Germans a little more in order to meet a balanced in-between,.

3. Staffing issues
  • Bridgehead teams (exchanging staff on a long term basis between cross cultural partners)
  • Mixed cultural teams in the client country
Hiring people who can effectively bridge cultures; money, company reputation, personality fit all play important roles in this. Some of these components are more important in one country than the other. 

4. Training

Its a two way process!
  • Pre-posting cultural training
  • Programs on language and cultural practices
  • Systematic on-the-job cross-cultural training (can be hard to transfer this intrinsic & experiential knowledge)
Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A. & Rosen, B. (2007) Leading Virtual Teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 60-70.

I really liked this article, especially as we are all taking part in PDT's for our ICT Project Management class. There were some helpful tips that could definitely be applied.

The six practices of Effective Virtual Team Leaders

1. Establish and maintain trust through use of communication technology - establish norms & revisit them repeatedly through virtual-get-togethers (reinvigorate)

2. Ensure diversity in the team is understood, appreciated, and leveraged - expertise directory, expertise matrix on team's virtual workspace, pairs from very different cultural backgrounds working together - greatest source of learning. Synchronous & Asynchronous collaboration rhythm

3. Manage virtual work cycle and meetings - brainstorming through all-team audio conferences, to turn meeting into choreographed events and ensure optimum productivity & creativity this event lifecycle can be used: 

  • Pre-meeting practices - use threads to post and review each others documents, post only about disagreements, and have a clear agenda
  • Start of meeting practice - share personal stories or hobbies
  • During meeting practice - using check-in to keep members engaged e.g. votting polls, IM
  • End of meeting practice - action lists for future assignments, minutes-on-the-go practice
  • Between meeting practice - IM, threads, announcements, automatic notifications
4. Monitor team progress through the use of technology - tracking database, issue log, 

5. Enhance external visibility of the team and its members - Balance score cards, steering committees, "reporting out" to sponsoring managers, "certificate of contribution" clarifies how the individuals contribution to the team would help the managers own division. Recognition and rewards become easier when visibility is enhanced

6. Ensure individuals benefit from participating in virtual teams - virtual reward ceremonies, starting meetings with recognition of specific successes, praising a manager for having a great employee. Team members generally gravitate to those commitments that give them the greatest benefits in terms of intellectual growth, visibility, and fun - leaders appeal to this by having mini-lectures from experts, virtual meetings with executives, internet scavenger hunts, virtual celebrations.

Because of the risk involved, the payoffs from virtual teams need to be substantial. The phrase "Think Global, Act Local" reflects the creative capacity of virtual teams. 

The term "Forewarned and Forearmed" is particularly true when it comes to virtual leadership and management.





Wednesday, 26 March 2014

Enterprise Crowdsourcing & Google Glass Review

Today I attended a seminar on Enterprise Crowdsourcing presented by Prof. Erran Carmel from Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington DC.

Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing that works on the premise of tapping into online workers on demand, and paying these workers a very small portion of money in return for very small contributions of work.

Prof. Carmel actually stated that he preferred the term "The Human Cloud" over "Crowdsourcing" as it is a better suggestion of labor markets.

I learned that all the biggest enterprises are doing this, including companies such as IBM and Google.

Some of the examples he gave that caught my attention included  

Amazon - Are seen as the crowdsourcing "giants" and one of the founders of this sector with their Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zappos - An online retailing company that discovered that the grammatical correctness of their product reviews effected sales so they used crowdsourcing to clean up up the English of their reviews!.

Text eagle - In Kenya m-Pesa was used to transfer small amounts of money via mobile to individuals who carried out tiny tasks on their 2G mobiles.


Microsoft - The company wanted to test its Security Essentials product globally and used uTest to assist them in this.
Genpact - is a business process management company that created their own crowdsourcing platform. 


He also wore a pair of Google's latest Google glass glasses, if that's how you say it!? It was interesting to see a pair of these in the flesh and watch him record and take photos on it. I loved hearing about his review as much of it wasn't necessarily what Google would want you to hear. Some of his comments included:

  • That the glasses "didn't do enough for him"; the apps were limited.
  • He used it mostly for taking pictures and video recording
  • It was somewhat uncomfortable for him to wear the glasses and deal with curious stares from others.
  • If he wanted to put sunglasses on he couldn't! 

  • The battery life was very limited - it would die after 30 minutes of recording.


Although he was critical he felt sure that it was nothing Google couldn't solve in the near future, but his gut feeling was that Google Glass is perhaps not 100% ready for the market as of yet. 

One thing he was sure of was that within the next ten years we would be most definitely all wearing wearable technology and that privacy would be a thing of the past! He seemed a little too sure of this to be honest which actually scared me a little! I'd like to think my privacy would be somewhat intact no matter how far into the future I could see!

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

Governance and Distributed Teams

This is the result from our glass discussion on Governance, whereby we linked the theory and concepts from our book with the following article; Vlaar et al. (2008) Cocreating Understanding and Value in Distributed Work: How members of onsite and offshore vendor teams Give, make, demand, and break sense.














Each person in the class wrote a concept on a post-it and those that related to one another were placed near each other on the whiteboard. Some of the issues that arose included:

  • The role of boundary spanners (having a single point of contact)
  • Service Level Agreements (SLA's)
  • Training (on-site vs offsite, onshore vs. offshore)
  • Knowledge transfer
  • How as students we are managing our own Partially Distributed Team (PDT) assignments
  • Technological infrastructure (importance of having it in place before starting a global project with distributed teams)
  • Tools for communication & collaboration

In terms of the article mentioned above some of the main findings and terms that arose from it and that contributed to our discussion on the above include:

1. The sociocognitive acts and communication processes members of distributed work teams use to advance their understandings:

Sensemaking: e.g. observing, reasoning, analyzing, contemplating, anticipating, imagining
Sense giving: attempt to alter and influence the way others think and act, e.g.: descriptions, explanations, signals
Sensedemadinging: actively seeking information, e.g. asking questions,
Sensebreaking: questioning exisiting understandings, e.g. negative criticism, big picture presentations that highlight radically different views from the ones currently existing.

2. The idea of asymmetrics between knowledge and experience:

Both congruence and actionability are needed for this:

Congruence - the term congruence qualifies the relationship between the expectations held and the actions and outcomes produced by different individuals.

Actionability - the capability of members to configure and execute action patterns in a manner coherently ties to someone else's expectations.



Monday, 10 March 2014

Transition Processes & Keeping PACE with the local Case Study

Tiwari, V. (2009) Transition During Offshore Outsourcing: A Process Model. ICIS 2009. Phoenix, Arizona, USA., International Conference on Information Systems.





UtilCo outsourcing the CUSTOMER project to Global Vendor (both onshore & offshore). This involved specific application development and maintenance activities.

Transitioning from onshore to offshore involves a combination of three inter-related organizational processes: Transfer, Learning, and Adaption.

The transition stage was split into three phase. Below I have outlined the main difficulties that were encountered throughout these stages and some of the steps taken to rectify them. 

1. Familiarize


Knowledge transfer:

There was difficulties with uncooperative contractors & a lack of tracking tools.

2. Adapt

Modifying Operating Model: Task division, communication structure, and delivery process:

Pilot stages - splitting team functions across geographies - complicated matters - maybe they should have keep activities that related closely and overlapped with one another together in one region.

There were problems with communication and role responsibilities - adaptive measures taken to resolve these.

Increasing knowledge and Understanding: High complexity work:

New pilots - higher complexity, lower volume - combining more functional consultancy along with technical development activities - facilitated further learning

Achieved Managed Operations (MO) state - UtilCo have official management responisibility of the entire delivery process (from Business requirements to business testing) but are using Global Vendor for all their activities from Functional design to functional testing

Restructuring retained organization: roles and internal processes:

Problems with changing the internal organization structure in terms of communication and operations - loss of flexibility - stages have to be complete before sending them offsite - makes amendments a lot more complicated

Shift from doing the activities to monitoring the activities - loss of creativity  autonomy. Reviewing rather than designing - new roles defined - professionals, specialists, and forecasting professional

3. Accelerate

Validating Modifications: pseudo service delivery and ramp-up

Aimed to progress to Managed Services (MS) - (including delivery & giving them more responsibility) 

Needed to hire new onshore and offshore personnel to handle increased work volume that came with the increased responsibility - mainly junior developers that had to learn quickly. Issues with knowledge imbalance between global vendor who could hire experienced contractors and Uticle whose contractors had left and new hired were inexperienced.

Redefining roles and ramp down of contractors - additional stress on retained personnel

Utilco intended the transition to be staged - but felt like big bang to staff

Outcome: Service delivery

Two months of psuedo delivery. Actual service delivery was achieved with satisfied performance from both firms (vague on the details!)
























In class we considered the following questions through group discussion:

What is the contribution?
What led to success?
Key Quotes.
Whats the basic story?
What would you do differently?
What would you do?

Issues:
Transparency
Contractors
Knowledge transfer (resolution - knowledge transfer document)
Communication/Resp
Contract

Biggest risk a company can take is change. Here in this case we have organizational change, it involved a lot of plugging in and out of parts. There has been a number of pieces of literature written about organizational change such as what we witness in this case. One such example is Lewin's change management model which consists of three stages; unfreeze, change, and refreeze. 

The potential value for technology and outsourcing in this case is big (not marginal/instrumental). You have to trip up sometimes to figure out how to work. Its ok to fail as long as your prepared to addressed that. Its all about what attitude you have; instrumental rigor, attentiveness, etc



PACE Case Study 


The transition to offshore was problematic - transition period was too long and PACE don't make money until they move offshore.

With PACE the clients got everything, competency, rare skills. For them making transition was all risk, and why risk it when they were getting everything they needed onshore.

Possible solutions:
  1. A differential cost model; ramp-up cost model if clients decided to stay on-site.
  2. Maybe they should have pivoted and become a research company rather than an engineering company

Monday, 3 March 2014

Anxiety and Psychological Security in Off-shoring Relationships

Kelly, S. & Noonan, C. (2008) Anxiety and psychological security in offshoring relationships: the role and development of trust as emotional commitment. Journal of Information Technology, 23, 232–248.


18 month period in Irish firm (NetTrade) during which a decision was made to outsource the development of a replacement for their core technology  to the offshore facilities of a large Indian software vendor (IndiaSoft).

The article gives us a clear insight into the relevant theories on globalization, risk, anxiety, and the production of trust before going into the case study details, these include the following:

Gidden's two types of trust:
  1. Trust in abstract systems - based on faceless commitment (e.g. banks; as a customer we may not fully understand the "backstage" operations - access points with knowledge experts represents and establishes our trust in that system, e.g. financial broker. Emotional trust is based on our continuous  interactions with these representatives, until the trust becomes habitus.
  2. Personal trust - based on facework commitments

Mayer et al.'s characteristics of trust:
  1. Ability - the skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within a specific domain.
  2. Benevolence - the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor. 
  3. Integrity - the trustors perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable
Zucker's three key modes of establishing trust:
  1. Process based - based on personal experience either through direct informal interaction or by formal indirect mechanisms based on reputation.
  2. Character based - based on labeling or stereotyping based on certain characteristics. These characteristics are used as an index for trust.
  3. Institutional based - based on person specific (e.g. certificates representing credibility) or intermediary mechanisms (insuring against loss e.g. insurance)
Courtship (establishing trust)

1. Process based

  • Direct - recommendations from friends, initial negotiations with Indiasoft
  • Indirect - The economist, reference clients

2. Institutional based

  • Person specific - certificates

3. Characteristic based

  • Integrity - well aligned values (humility)
  • Benevolence - care & attentiveness (reassurance they wouldn't be lost within the grander scale of things), allowed them to pay in small installments
  • "Good vibes" - emotional commitment - main determinant
Cohabitation (constructing a stable collaborative order)

1. Signalling

  • Praising one project team member over another - causing removal of the unfavorable one

2. Brokering

  • Boundary Spanners - individuals who facilitate sharing
  • Eased anxiety when communication was failing - had someone in "both camps" -  Stephen
  • Complicated when boundary spanner develops close ties e.g. Indian broker Sunil told by superiors not to share code - awkward moment telling John (conflicting loyalties)
3. Third man
  • Outside third party - no relation
  • Aggresive questioning of Sunil (who was displeased) - this was uncomfortable for John and would not have taken place without the third man.


Following the reading of this case it led me to think about the definition of trust and how it is established: