Multinational/Multicultural Teams in Offshore IT Projects

In order to work successfully together, it is important that people understand each other. In global IT-projects, different team-members, with diverse cultural backgrounds, work from different locations. A consequence of this is that the synchronous, face-to-face communication that you can see in project where everyone are located in the same room, is highly restricted. The global environment add to the communication challenges and potential misunderstandings. Previous research about global IT-projects focuses a lot on the different challenges, including communication. Having worked as an IT-professional in global projects myself; I had a desire to explore what people do to mitigate the communication challenges. I did qualitative research in two of the leading countries in global IT-offshoring, Indian and the Philippines, as well as in my home country Norway and Denmark. The informants are all IT-professionals with experience from global projects. They shared their knowledge regardi...

The importance of intercultural challenges is recognized by both the practitioners and researchers in offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) relationships. These challenges affect almost all the activities involved in offshore software development outsourcing relationships especially communication, mutual understanding, interpretation and decision making processes etc. which in turn leads to project failure. In our previous published study we identified, through systematic literature review (SLR), various intercultural challenges faced by vendors in OSDO relationship. The aim of this study was to validate these findings through industry practitioners and to identify its intensity as well as to identify any other intercultural challenges, faced by vendor organizations in OSDO relationships. We performed questionnaire surveys with 41 experts from different software companies. A seven point likert scale was used to determine the significance of each intercultural challenge. Our findings indicate that all the intercultural challenges are critical for OSDO vendors. We further analyzed these challenges based on different variables, such as company size, company type, expert's job/position etc. We have identified that there is no significant difference in the intercultural challenges based on company type and expert's experience level. We identified that " language and language proficiency " is the most commonly agreed and " difference in social behaviour " is the most commonly disagreed intercultural challenge in the category of both sizes of company. Similarly " language and language proficiency " is the most commonly agreed challenge based on experts job positions.

This article will first explore the influence of cultural issues on management in general before turning to the principal areas of cultural impact on outsourcing. We continue with discussing the most important measures that should be considered in any situation where work is outsourced and conclude with two analyses of actual cases.

Journal of Intercultural Management, 2016

Virtual teams are usually geographically dispersed and consist of members from different countries and cultures. They influences internal communication processes and can cause personal conflicts, misunderstandings or lack of trust. Intercultural diversity is also significant for goal setting and team effectiveness. The aim of this article is to check if virtual team members appreciate the cultural diversity or rather suffer from lack of team cohesion and mutual understanding. The article presents research conducted among specialists from IT sector who have experience in working in virtual teams. They perceive intercultural collaboration in virtual teams as the opportunity to exploit the potential of specialists from all over the world but they also point to some challenges related to cross-cultural virtual teamwork.

Information Systems Frontiers, 2008

Offshore outsourcing to vendors in foreign countries causes unique challenges which need to be understood and managed effectively. This paper explores cultural differences in IS offshoring arrangements involving German client organizations that outsource application development activities to Indian vendors. For this purpose, a research framework is developed based on both theoretical considerations and specific empirical observations from multiple case studies. The goal is to (1) explore the nature of cultural differences in offshore outsourcing arrangements in depth and to (2) analyze the relationship between those cultural differences and offshore outsourcing success. Based on the case findings, implications and practices for the management of offshore development projects are outlined. The results indicate that cultural differences in terms of power distance, IS designer values, and an active versus passive working attitude critically affect several dimensions of relationship quality, thereby influencing offshore outsourcing success. A clear definition of roles and mechanisms, strong leadership, and an active management of culture by adapting to either the client's or the vendor's national culture appeared to be effective ways to manage cultural differences.

PRAESTANTIA NEXUS DIGEST, 2024

The dynamics of company operations have evolved significantly in an interconnected world, with firms expanding their search for talent globally. The collaboration between local and offshore teams is crucial for success, but it also brings communication challenges. I'm excited to share the document "Bridging Oceans: Mastering Seamless Communication with Offshore IT Teams," which offers a comprehensive guide on effectively managing these challenges. Efficient communication is key for successful collaboration, especially in international initiatives. Businesses, particularly in the IT sector, are increasingly leveraging offshore teams for specialized knowledge, cost efficiency, and 24/7 work capacity. However, overcoming obstacles like geographical distances, cultural differences, time zones, and communication methods is essential to fully reap the benefits of offshore collaborations.

Journal of Intercultural Management, 2014

This position paper presents the factors involved in the successful software development and what is the impact of some methodologies like Agile in this process. Global software development projects may be a total success or an anticipated disaster for simple reasons that usually have nothing to do with the technology involved, with the time differences, or the product being built, but because of subtle intercultural factors. How do the language, the race, the gender, the religion, and the location affects the software development process from analysis and design to implementation, testing and maintenance? Do all these factors impact in the same way if we are working with a local team, and offshore development team or even a global virtual team? Is any specific software development methodology better suited for your particular case? How could you decide what's the better approach? What will be the results and what our goals? The issues at stake are not superficial matters of the ways how people dress, or how clear do they speak in our local language, or what they like to eat, or their small daily behaviors, but are based in the fundamental differences in the systems of values that govern our lives. So institutions, corporations and global companies have to raise the level of awareness of their employees worldwide on the cultural differences, through various programs for intercultural or diversity training. But this poor model of cultural awareness is not enough to overcome some of the obstacles that intercultural differences bring to the table. So this paper will list and describe this important intercultural factors that directly impact in the software development process and how certain software development methodologies could be used in order to have a more systematic look or set of guidelines that would allow the team managers to evaluate and to decide how the use of each one of these software development methodologies for local teams, non local teams and virtual teams will affect positively or negatively the outcomes of software development practices.

IET Software, 2014

CONTEXT-Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is an emerging business approach adopted by many software development organisations in developed countries. There are many motivations for developing software at offshore locations including access to large labor pool, low development cost, high quality and round-the-clock development. However, in spite of these motivations OSDO presents a variety of challenges to the software development organisations including temporal, geographical and intercultural differences. Intercultural differences cause many relationship problems between vendors and client organisations in OSDO.

2008

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Communication is a major factor of success or failure for any software project. In offshore software development OSD, communication is more critical than collocated software development. Frequent communication is not always possible due to challenges like time zone differences, holiday customs etc where client and vendor working hours do not overlap. This communication problem affects the success of offshoring decision in terms of cost, schedule, time-to-market, client-vendor trust, and customer and business satisfaction. For successful software project offshoring, successful communication is necessary. This paper provides a preliminary exploration for communication mode/mediums and challenges involved in OSD. A classification is presented for offshore software development activities and the communication modes/mediums used to perform those activities. A hypothetical framework has also been proposed on the basis of this classification.