A few weeks ago I spoke to Tom van Lamoen, operational manager at Estate, one of our customers. He has worked with teams in India and Eastern Europe in the past years and he mentioned that one of his greatest obstacles was ‘expectations management’. I believe that this is one of the root subjects that determines success or failure in any cooperation, especially in an offshoring context.
Tom told me about a very interesting workshop that he did with his former Indian team. He travelled to India to meet his team and organized a discussion around one central question: ‘ What does the Indian team think the Dutch team expects of them?’ How often did you ask this question to your employees or your team? Imagine the response! It will give a lot of clues where mis-alignment in expectations is taking place.
4 central areas for expectation management
I always liked the number 5, so I will shortly discuss 5 central areas where I believe expectations are prone to be mis-aligned in working with an offshore team. If you identify more, please add a comment, it enriches our mutual learning.
Requirements: Why did you build it like this?! How comes the result is completely different from what I expected?
The onshore team has a certain understanding of what they need. They put this need into writing (hopefully), send over the document and the offshore team starts reading. But what do the teams understand from it? Is everything clearly explained without chances of different interpretation?
Communication: What is the status of my project? Why does the offshore not update me about progress? What do you mean by this? Why didn’t you ask that upfront? Communication encompasses the other areas, but is so important that I mention it seperately. The offshore team is far away and you do not stand at the coffee machine together or lunch in the same room. You miss frequent contact and that’s why thinking about communication is so incredibly crucial if you want to make offshoring a success.
Responsibilities: Why didn’t you do this? Why do I need to remind you? Why is Rakesh not in office today?
If everybody is working inside the same office (or employed in the same entity), it seems straightforward that function profiles, stating responsibilities and tasks for each person or role. So why do we omit that once the colleagues are offshore, employed by another company?
Performance: What do we expect in terms of deadlines and what if it’s not made? What is acceptable quality?
When working with employees, many companies spend much time on developing logical kpi’s that indicate whether a person had a good day/week/month. When the employee is sitting in the same office, getting a sense of performance without objective data is already hard (If I see you on a daily basis, I have a vague notion). Imagine with people far away: how do you know what they achieve for you if you don’t have any measurement of performance?
4 instruments to manage expectations
To get everything in place and lay a foundation to know what each person both onshore and offshore expects, 4 instruments help:
1. Develop a clear written process description
This is the single most important starting point of any cooperation that crosses geographical boundaries and cultures. Make a step by step description of the process that is needed to produce the results you expect. Use that process and keep on improving it.
2. Develop function profiles
Write down the role or person’s name and list all responsibilities and tasks that come under it. Make sure that somebody is accountable for the most important things that need to get done.
3. Create a meeting rythm
This is one of the strongest instruments to streamline the whole cooperation. Get everybody who is involved in the cooperation, into a daily and/or weekly meeting. Set fixed day, time, duration and participants and ensure that the meetings take place. It also helps greatly to have a predefined agenda with 3-5 topics that are discussed in each meeting.
4. Develop & monitor KPI’s
It’s important that every person in the offshore team gets a clear, mutually agreed KPI. The KPI’s can be linked to the responsibilities of each role/person. Once the kpi’s are determined, they can be measured and monitored on a daily/weekly/monthly basis and used as input for the meetings. This way, everybody can openly discuss progress and it keeps the team sharp to perform according to expectations.
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Excellent points and a good starting point for future initiatives with companies with offshore locations or are outsourcing. Even people talking the same language can have misunderstandings and with global or outsourcing companies, they are learning to combine different means of communication to convey thoughts and ideas outside of simple means, as well as learning to consider other factors that they would not normally be exposed to.
very interesting and practical observations. I would like to add another diemnsion which the foreign companies working in India often take for granted and that is – How does the foreign team think, the Indian team understands them or their project objectives, and more importantly how does it align with their career objective. I have often seen Foreign companies come and hire people in India who have no idea about the company objectives and ends up losing them quickely.
Great article, Hugo! I can think of one more item to add to the solutions: Make sure that the team has all the tools in place that they need to be effective and efficient, and deliver the output. You may assume that the team has a similar work environment, and access to infrastructure, websites etc. but that may not be true. Discuss up front (or in the process description) if certain pieces of infrastructure are necessary or expected, to catch any gaps early on. Set the expectation with the team to communicate those gaps. I’ve seen teams deliver what they thought was the next best option, without letting me (the client) know that they just didn’t have the necessary tools to create the output.
Simple example: if you expect the output as a PDF file, the team will need some software to print to PDF. In a very security-conscious and cost-conscious environement, having Adobe Acrobat Professional or downloaded freeware may not be the “default”.
You already mentioned it in your intro, I think it’s critical to meet each other in person at least one time. If you meet in person it means one of the two parties takes the time to travel to the other part of the world, making it easier to claim time and set the process, responsibilities, discuss the project, deadlines, etc. Also it creates some familiarity, it’s easier to work together with people you met in person, specially when you were also in a non-formal, outside of the office setting. I wrote a blog post on that some time ago: http://tomvanlamoen.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/offshore-visits/
So my advise: when starting a long term cooperation: meet each other in person.
Excellent points Hugo, both on the issues and the methods you offer for solution. One common pit fall I see also is in terms of our understanding of communications. In an Indian cultural context, communication skill is often linked to the skill of the English language. While language certainly is important, it does not encompasse the entire communication. And for that to happen in an orderly manner, process is key and the same applies to quality and mechanisms to control quality.
I enjoyed reading your blog, looking forward to more.
Thanks
Venkatesh