If managed properly, incorporating an offshore development team can also help improve the quality of your project in the following ways, says Rupilius:

• It forces you to follow a rigorous development process
• It requires detailed documentation along the entire development cycle
• It forces you to define your priorities clearly

“It’s not only about reducing project costs. That’s what everyone thinks when they think about offshore development. However, in my experience you can also improve the overall quality of your projects,” says Rupilius.

To enjoy that improvement in quality, however, project managers must approach offshore development carefully. Successfully leading an offshore development team requires proficiency in both interpersonal and process management skills.

Rupilius has highlighted the following six keys for managing an offshore development team. When used as a general framework, these tips can help you reduce costs while boosting the quality of your SAP project.

Key #1: Stay clear of the ping-pong game

While technical and functional teams should enjoy open channels of communication during a project, project managers should do everything they can to avoid what Rupilius calls the ping-pong game — in which technical and functional teams bounce requests, questions, and comments back and forth in an endless loop.

Too much back-and-forth, says Rupilius, leads to several issues that can harm the project. These issues include delays, as team members wait for answers via email before moving on with the task at hand, and infighting, as technical and functional team members blame each other for issues that arise during the project.

“The functional team will say the technical team doesn’t understand what they’re requesting — and the technical team will say the functional team isn’t documenting well enough. It goes back and forth like that until you’ve got the ping-pong effect,” says Rupilius.

The solution is to involve the technical team as much as possible in the business considerations of the project. The more the technical team understands about your company, its internal systems, and its goals for the project, the more it will be able to produce high-quality results.

“You have to make the technical team more than just a factory for developing individual business objects,” Rupilius says. “The way to do that is to make the technical team — or at least some representatives — part of the design process early in your project. That way the technical team already has a lot of the knowledge required to do its work and they don’t always have to go back to the functional team with questions.”

Another way to minimize the ping-pong effect is to implement high-quality standards on your functional specification documents. Any lack of clarity in those documents will lead to confusion on the part of the technical team, says Rupilius.

Finally, Rupilius suggests implementing daily status meetings between the functional and technical leads rather than relying only on trackers and other technical methods. This will help channel questions and concerns about project tasks into a formal setting, where the project leadership can help solve the issue and move the project forward. These status meetings do not need to involve the entire team. If the onsite and offshore point people engage in some form of daily dialog, that should be sufficient, he says.

Key #2: Create a Commitment

Just as increasing the technical team’s knowledge of your business helps them understand your project better, increasing the technical team’s commitment to the project’s success will help improve the quality of their work.

According to Rupilius, many project managers are quick to forget that while the technical development of a project may take place out of sight, there are human elements at work that can affect the outcome of your project. Offshore development workers have professional goals, personal lives, hobbies, and unique work styles — just like their onsite counterparts.

“The moment you forget about that and start to think of just getting code out of them, they start to feel less attached and you lose productivity,” says Rupilius.

To ensure commitment to a project, you have to create a sense of purpose, belonging, and a reward strategy for offshore contractors. One of the best ways to do this is to visit the offshore facility and take the time to engage the employees at the outset of the project.

“Getting to know the people who work on your project and how they work, expressing an interest in and appreciation for their culture, and creating a personal and professional bond will go a long way in my experience,” says Rupilius. “People really appreciate that.”

Another way to secure commitment is to create a reward strategy that recognizes key contributions. This strategy doesn’t have to involve huge sums, according to Rupilius — just enough to show your appreciation for hard work and dedication.

A good project manager will also ensure that the project is aligned with the offshore developer’s professional goals, and that there is a mechanism in place to deal with personal issues that may arise.

“The key is to treat them the same way you would treat your onsite team members,” says Rupilius.

Key #3: Get the Right Skills on Your Team

Staffing a project team is one of the most important challenges of project management. That holds true for offshore technical teams, which must be rigorously vetted to give you the best chance at success, says Rupilius.

To successfully staff your offshore team, start at the top. Focus first on key roles such as onsite development lead, offsite development lead, and offshore management lead. Once you have carefully selected those resources, move on to the rest of the technical team as appropriate.

“If you are bringing some team members onsite, they should be the ones with the most experience and the strongest communication skills,” says Rupilius. “The leads must be people capable of leading teams in complex projects and in time-critical situations.”

Project managers should take a similar approach to vetting developers, says Rupilius. No two SAP projects are the same, so you may need a very specific set of skills — from ABAP and middleware coding to Java and SAP portal knowledge — from your development team.

Rupilius recommends beginning this effort at the very earliest stages of your project planning. It could take an offshore development company months to locate or train developers with the right skills for your project. In some cases, highly skilled developers will be able to help newer developers along.

Timing is also a challenge when building an offshore development team. Figure 1 illustrates a guide to ramping up (and ramping down) an offshore development team stage-by-stage. The mix of onsite and offshore team members will change during the life of the project, depending on your needs.

Figure 1

The blend of onsite and offshore team members changes over the life of the project

Key #4: Track Projects the Right Way

Keeping tabs on project progress is critical to meeting deadlines and staying on target. When it comes to managing offshore development, the key is to formalize a system for tracking progress.

Many project managers simply ask developers for an estimate of how far along they are on a given task. The problem with this approach, says Rupilius, is that those estimates are usually too optimistic or ill-defined. A developer might tell you he is 80% finished with a task, but does that mean he's spent eight hours on the task already and expects to spend two more? Or does it mean he's completed eight coding tasks and still has to complete the two most laborious? Either way, the percentage figure is suspect, says Rupilius.

A better approach, he says, is to rely on more discreet status points. For example, the status of a development object could move from "not started" to "started" to "completed" to "approved." Project managers may allocate percentage values to those status points (0%, 25%, 75%, 100%) if desired, but the important thing is to build your project plan around concrete deliverables.

"When you develop your plan and decide where you need to be every week, you don't just look at the percentages. You establish a plan built around how many you want to have approved each week. How many functional specs need to be in approved status? How many technical unit tests or functional unit tests need to be in approved status? Using those metrics gives you the most accurate picture of where you really are," says Rupilius.

It is critical to allocate 100% status only after a task has been approved. This is especially true when managing an offshore development team.

"That way you don't rely on the person doing the work. There's always someone else who must approve it, so you have checks and balances in place," he says.

Key #5: Adapt to the Culture

Many projects will require a mixed arrangement of contracted developers. Most will perform their duties offsite, but some will join the rest of the project team at your site. Such complex arrangements require special considerations from the project manager.

The developers you bring onsite may be first-time visitors to your country. It is natural for them to feel lost and overwhelmed by the new culture. This can lead them to try to shorten their stay, says Rupilius, a situation that can damage the progress of your project. Making onsite representatives from an offshore company feel welcome is a key to success.

"You should build a support model and make sure they are getting assistance from team members who are already on site, so they have someone on their side that has already gone through that process," says Rupilius.

That assistance can take many forms, but includes picking up new team members at the airport and helping them through initial transportation and housing challenges. Project managers should continue to reach out culturally during the project by planning inclusive team outings and helping foreign workers maintain cultural connections as best as possible — even if that just means eating at a restaurant serving native cuisine once a week.

The primary lesson is to avoid creating a "sub-team" of foreign workers. Project managers should take steps to include offshore representatives into the larger project team as smoothly as possible.

Key #6: Create Overlapping Work Hours

No matter where your company is located, you are likely to experience time zone issues with an offshore development site. In some cases, the time zones may be dramatically different. Project managers should plan carefully to avoid issues arising from this challenge, says Rupilius.

"It's difficult to work together when one side is sleeping while the other is working," he says. "You need to think upfront about it and establish overlapping work hours with your offshore facility."

For example, an Indian offshore company may agree to establish two shifts — an early shift and a late shift — to ensure that there are always developers at work during US working hours, according to Rupilius. Overlapping work hours also allow the project manager to formalize routine status update meetings.

Expanding the Offshore Model

The benefits of successfully managing an offshore team don't end with development work streams, says Rupilius. Once you have established a framework for working with offshore teams, you can expand that model to reduce the time and cost of a variety of tasks.

For example, testing can be broken up into small pieces that can be executed remotely by an offshore team. Some configuration work can be performed by offshore teams, though you will likely need to employ a higher onsite/offshore ratio for that type of work, says Rupilius.

"Once you know how to handle this model, you can take it beyond the traditional development effort to other areas as well," he says.

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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