The document discusses ways an offshore team improved engagement and ownership of a software project. The team increased communication, implemented regular status reporting, and delegated resources onsite. These changes built trust with partners and improved predictability. As a result, the offshore team took on more work, delivered additional features ahead of schedule, and received very positive feedback and requests for more offshoring from partners. However, challenges around testing automation, buffer management, and continuous learning remain.

1. Mantra for Entrepreneurial Project Management
Mangesh Sardesai
Consultant
Siemens Technology and Services Private Limited

2. Title: Becoming the preferred partner…
Theme: Mantra for Entrepreneurial Project Management
Abstract
Challenge: The project is executed in support mode - tasks are assigned after detailed analysis by the
partner. The offshore team needs to increase its involvement through-out the software development life-cycle.
Proposed solution: Increase ownership by collaboration, higher productivity, enhancing knowledge and
delivering higher quality.
Analyzing project artifacts and partner feedback identified following action areas:
1. Communication – Increase trust by conveying information to the right stakeholders at the right
time.
2. Status reporting – Push data for better informed and proactive decisions.
3. Risk management – Document risks identified and share risk-plan regularly.
4. Predictability – Share tracked and closed issues to ensure timely deliveries.
5. Scope management – Allows better decision-making and responsibility sharing.
6. Testing – Strategize so that testing is flexible and adaptive to un-planned changes made in the
software.
7. Stakeholder Management – Delegate personnel as part of the onsite team.
8. Resource optimization:
 Unify resources across sub-teams for cost advantages.
 Increase use of virtualization.
An action plan based on above points was shared and tracked - The activity was lauded by the partners
and they sought greater engagement at all levels of the project.
This is just the beginning. Newer and greater challenges lie ahead.
1. Buffer management – Estimates must be pragmatic.
2. Testing automation – Increase productivity and control risk
3. Put yourselves in the partners’ shoes – Align with the objectives
4. Knowledge sharing – Core team must focus on domain and learning from customer support team,
competitors etc.
All this boosts confidence in the team and partners as we progress!

3. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................3
Solution approach...............................................................................................................................4
Communication...............................................................................................................................4
Status reporting ..............................................................................................................................5
Risk management ...........................................................................................................................6
Predictability ...................................................................................................................................6
Scope management ........................................................................................................................6
Testing ...........................................................................................................................................7
Stakeholder Management ................................................................................................................8
Resource optimization .....................................................................................................................8
Challenges .........................................................................................................................................8
Results...............................................................................................................................................9
Technical ........................................................................................................................................9
Productivity.....................................................................................................................................9
Partner feedback ............................................................................................................................9
More off-shoring............................................................................................................................ 10
Attrition......................................................................................................................................... 10
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 10
List of figures
Figure 1: Communication paths ...........................................................................................................5
Figure 2: Stakeholder management by delegation.................................................................................8
Figure 3: Partner feedback ................................................................................................................ 10
Introduction
The project is a legacy application that is in the market for more than 15 years. It has an established and
large customer base. Given this history, it is understandable that the partner has some hesitation towards
off-shoring. However, with increasing saturation in the developed countries, upcoming opportunities in the

4. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and other Asian countries provide strategic support to off-shoring
because of closeness to the emerging market.
This paper provides a case study of the changes implemented in an off-shored project with a view to
become the preferred partner. It highlights the challenges in implementation and ways in which they were
effectively addressed.
Solution approach
This process involved 3 basic steps to begin with:
1. Focus on the problems to be solved
2. Come up with approaches that are effective and acceptable within the project constraints
3. Applying past learning to the selected problem solution(s) and see whether the desired results will
be achieved
This brought the following areas into focus:
Communication
Software is all about design and learning. Design and learning are collaboration efforts. Good
communication makes collaboration more effective. The major cost of lack of collaboration is –
rework.
Accordingly, an elaborate communication protocol was setup. This included well defined
communication channels shown in Figure 1.

5. Figure 1: Communication paths
Information sharing rather than just status reporting became the main objective. So meetings
were planned with the partners after activities that were most likely to change the project status
i.e.
 Technical meetings with the software architect that could cause changes in priorities or
newer tasks
 Project stakeholder meetings that could change the higher level objectives of the project
especially around important milestones
Accordingly the frequency of meetings with the partners was set to twice a week.
This ensured that by conveying information to the right stakeholders (technical as well as project
management) at the right time, trust could be increased - because the change in priorities and
subsequent re-planning was transparent.
Status reporting
In continuation to the previous point, elaborate information templates were devised - containing type
of information to be pushed depending on the meeting

6.  Technical information included completed tasks, challenges faced and overcome, unsolved
issues with possible solutions, learnings while implementing certain tasks and areas where
further progress was blocked.
 Project information like availability, upcoming bottlenecks, risks, important reminders for
action items tailored to the various project phases
This ensured that the relevant data was always at hand when the time came for making decisions
and increased productivity by reducing the time required for preparing for meetings. Also, this led to a
certain expected predictability about the outcome of such meetings - people started looking forward to
such meetings.
This ensured that correct data was pushed for better informed and proactive decisions.
Risk management
Risks identified were documented and the risk-plan was also shared with the partners regularly during
project status meetings. Risks were tracked and probability as well as risk exposure were updated
and communicated to all stakeholders.
Predictability
Even issues encountered and resolved were tracked, closed and then shared with the partners . This
allowed the partners to see the efforts made to ensure timely deliveries even in cases where issues
could have caused delays. This in turn increased faith in the partners that the deliveries were
predictable – the offshore team always stuck to the planned delivery schedule.
Points 3 and 4 bring a lot of advantages:
 Partners can see the challenges foreseen as well as faced and approaches taken to
overcome them
 The realization that although the goals are same, problems faced might be different (or the
solutions)
 Partners might be able to help out in areas that they are familiar with
 If not, it is fun to solve such things together - it reinforces the feeling that we are in it together
Scope management
Scope was defined in terms of activities to be carried out, their priorities and then who is best
positioned to handle the activities. For example, certification and audit activities were off-shored as
the relevant authorities were co-located.
This was possible because the offshore team demonstrated that they could:

7.  Collaborate well with other offshore teams that had undergone certification so that so that
certification challenges were identified before-hand and addressed
 Proposal to use multiple environments to speed up troubleshooting, parallelize execution
and risk mitigation for the issues identified during the certification testing
Feedback on implemented features was scoped to the partners as they were closer to the established
markets.
This built up confidence that certain areas would be the strengths of the offshore team and in other
areas the onsite team was the eyes and ears of the combined team. This appealed a lot to the onsite
team - they were culturally happy with well-defined activities. On the other hand, the offshore team
enjoyed working on and learning from newer areas of the project execution. This led to increased
domain know-how and left the onsite team free to focus on the existing customer base with whom
they have forged strong relationships. This was a win-win situation for both teams.
Testing
The product testing activities were already off-shored completely. The challenge was to increase the
productivity and optimize the testing effort. There were many aspects to this approach:
 Involve the test team in unit testing so that they could add value to the development effort
earlier on in the project lifecycle
 Prioritize and optimize between unit testing and product testing
 Repeatable tests i.e. regression tests were structured in such a way that technical
documentation authors and developers could also run them to learn more about the existing
features. This helped them ramp-up on areas of the application that were new to them. It also
allowed them to aid in the testing effort whenever required.
 Involve PDM in test design reviews so that all would be in agreement as to the expected
results during the course of the sprints.
This allowed involved strategizing so that testing became flexible and adaptive to un-planned
changes made in the software.

8. Stakeholder Management
As part of increasing the stakeholder engagement, the idea was to delegate experienced personnel
as part of the onsite team. It was planned and executed as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Stakeholder management by delegation
This increased trust because the onsite team worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the delegated
personnel. The delegated personnel could understand why and how the partners functioned in a
certain way that was different from the way in which the offsite team functioned. This enabled the
offsite team to leverage the best of both methods and work more effectively.
Resource optimization
 Unify resources across sub-teams for cost advantages: This point was drafted keeping in
mind the fact that a bigger project team can pool its resources as opposed to multiple smaller
teams. The resource usage could then be optimized because the sub-project milestones
were generally staggered based on their involvement in the system being developed.
 Increase use of virtualization: This helped a lot in the testing arena. Testers could prepare
Virtual Machine images in advance based on the various topologies and Operating Systems
on which the product had to be tested. Based on the priorities of the deployment topology
and the Operating Systems, priority environments could be verified first before moving on to
lesser priority environments. It also helped a lot in having multiple environments to reproduce
issues that were Operating System specific – allowing faster turnaround of annoying issues
arising from different behavior of the Operating Systems.
Challenges
Following points were identified as the challenges:

9. 1. Difference in the maturity of the developer community and the fact that we provide an
‘Engineering Solution’ and not just software
2. Mismatch in the age and working culture of the teams
3. Forge a relationship based on trust, knowledge transfer, delivering the goods and eventually take
up ownership
Both teams were sensitized about this at kick-off and any challenges that might actualize were monitored
and tracked.
With support from management and both teams being open to trying out the proposed solution, none of
the foreseen challenges actualized.
Results
Technical
 Technical meetings were hailed as a best practice by partners
 Domain knowledge increased and this was evident from the fact that in the next release
many critical features were off-shored for analysis and implementation
 Even after bringing in the process changes and a project structure change, the team
delivered all the planned features with good quality
Productivity
The offshore team was able to implement 3 new features in addition to the planned count of 4 taking
the total features delivered to 7. Not only this, the team was also able to automate an in-house
developed simulator for testing. The resulting solution was so streamlined that end-customer demos
were provided using this automation package – with zero defects reported from the field.
Partner feedback
The partners were very satisfied with the results of the project management changes brought in. This
was evident from the ratings received from the partners. The feedback was the best overall since
project inception as demonstrated in Figure 3.
Criteria Start ‘12 Mid ‘12 Start ‘13 Mid ‘13
Product Quality 8 8 9 9

10. Domain Competence 7 7 8 8
Willingness to refer offshore
partner to others
8 9 9 9
Technical Skills of the Team 8 8 8 9
Quality of Processes 8 8 8 9
Responding Quickly to Queries 9 9 9 10
Figure 3: Partner feedback
More off-shoring
 The partners felt confident enough to offshore one more testing mini-project. This involves
new recruitment and is on-going.
 A certification centre was set up at the offshore location. Its purpose is to leverage the
knowledge gained from off-shoring certification for this project and assist other projects from
the same domain achieve certification.
Attrition
Attrition rate for the 2-year period ending 2013 was within acceptable limits at 6.45%.
Conclusion
All the solution approaches were chalked up knowing that no single big step would change the
situation, many small changes in the way we engage with partners would make a bigger impact.
The results validate this impact. However, this is just the beginning. Newer and greater challenges lie
ahead:
1. Buffer management – Estimates must be pragmatic. Buffer management is a challenge so that
productivity is enhanced along with quality.
2. Testing automation – Need to increase automation to improve productivity and also control risk by
making tests repeatable
3. Put yourselves in the partners’ shoes – Align with the objectives. Implement learning from the on-site
delegation so as to continuously improve and build on the results achieved
4. Knowledge sharing – A core team has been formed to focus on domain and learning from
customer support team, competitors etc.

11. The team and partners are confident and the results have given us even more energy to keep walking
along this path of continuing to be the preferred partner by applying the mantra of Entrepreneurial
Project Management.