Distributed Development: How important is face-to-face interaction?

October 4, 2007 by Vaibhav

I work for a software company which has their development center in India. A large portion of the work that we take on has to do with product co-development. These clients are typically ISVs who have active product development teams. They usually partner with us to augment their team sizes to take advantage of the extended daily development cycle. So, for a client who is in the US, for example, our team here takes over from the US team when they come into the office and then hand over to the US team when they leave; this allows almost round-the-clock development.

In such a scenario, where two separate teams are working in close coordination with each other, the right kind interpersonal relationship within team members can really boost productivity and efficiency. So, how do you get a proper relationship going?

Most of our clients tend to start off a project with us by first testing us out with some small pilot task; and once they feel comfortable with the work performed, they get into a much more involved engagement. During this period, there are a lot of emails and phone calls exchanged. Usually, at this stage we recommend to the client that either someone from his team visit us in our office or fly someone over from our team to meet their team.

Below, I am going to cite a real project scenario about how the engagement with one of these clients was before I met them face-to-face versus how it was after I had spent a couple of weeks at the client’s office.

BEFORE

• We were always tip-toeing around during our phone conversations because we were always vary of saying something that might not go down well with the team on the other end.
• Our email conversations were very formal, which sometimes made it hard to get the right message across.
• We had no idea about who was playing what role in the other team. Sure, we had the knowledge of their ‘supposed roles’, but in real life, a person can play roles which different from their supposed job.
• All in all, there was a huge client-vendor kind of environment; this kind of relationship doesn’t work very well within co-development partnerships. You need to have a feeling of being two parts of the SAME team.
• Well, then I flew to the client’s offices and met and worked with their team for a couple of weeks.

AFTER

• Our phone calls became much more informal; there were a lot more jokes being made; the overall environment became much more relaxed. This allowed us to focus on work much more than focusing on making sure that we were stepping correctly.
• Emails became much more to the point.
• We now know who to go to when there was an issue with the servers; who to bug when a database script needed to be run; who handles the escalated issues; and who to talk to when design needs to be discussed.
• We were now able to divide the work much better as there was no more ‘your work, our work’ feeling. It became one team.

The end result was that we were getting much more done with much less time spent on coordination. I got my team to connect with the client’s team members on an individual basis since I now felt assured after having met them.

The other huge benefit from the client’s perspective is that it gives them the assurance that they are working with real people, with real personalities. This goes a long way in maintaining lasting partnerships.

What kind of benefits have you seen in face-to-face communication?

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