A Transnational Partnership

Zaid Hassan answers questions about his experiences in managing a partnership between Smartchange (www.smartchange.org) and a Bulgarian-based technology company. (First published August 2001.)

When and how did your partnership start?

The partnership evolved from an older partnership. Roy King, the CTO of smartchange, in his prior job ran a development company. His partner in this company was our current lead designer Mike Daley, an American who while studying in London fell in love with a Bulgarian girl, Maria, and followed her to Sofia (they are now happily married).

Mike and Roy decided to set up a development company utilizing the skills of Bulgarian programmers, of which there were plenty. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union designated industries to different countries, for example Poland was heavy engineering, Bulgaria was computers � hardware and software development.

The idea was that Roy would be based in London and source work for the team in Bulgaria. The company was in business for around two years.

Prior to joining smartchange Roy and Mike sold the company to local management and became its first clients.

What are the disadvantages?

Offshore development is always difficult. The disadvantages are that you need to communicate a massive amount of tacit information through very explicit media. Often this is not possible and in that case you're not operating on certainties but rather on gut instincts and interpretations of messages. This is a big disadvantage if you're a project manager with clear and pressing deadlines. It becomes very hard to provide certainty internally, which in turn becomes a reflection of your skills as a project manager. In other words it's a high risk situation.

What are the advantages?

The advantages are that it's fast, it's cheap and the programmers are technically skilled and innovative.

What kinds of cultural differences have you encountered?

The main cultural difference I encountered was a huge aversion to process, which in Bulgaria means 'unnecessary bureaucracy'. So we had to work very hard educating our own developers on project management processes. We found a lot of skepticism and had to invest a lot of energy trying to convince the team that project management and risk management processes were an integral part of our development methodology and indeed our culture.

For example when we asked the developers to fill in time sheets we got back the response that they would rather kill their mothers then fill in time sheets!

Attitudes towards team working in Bulgaria can be summed up by the following Bulgarian saying: one Bulgarian is better then ten Germans, but one German is better then ten Bulgarians.

What are the difficulties in managing a relationship at such a distance?

In order for the process to succeed you need one of two things.

Either you need a team that you have a lot of trust in. This typically means that both parties need to agree on trying to establish a long term relationship where the relationship is more valuable then the success of any one individual project. Given that most people who outsource are more concerned about short terms goals this is a big issue. This also means having a willingness to work through some very frustrating issues, within both organisations, such as delivery dates slipping or project budgets slipping. So if people are thinking about outsourcing then it's worth thinking hard about the initial investment that will need to be made in order to see actual financial benefits from offshore development.

The alternative to this is that both teams are religiously committed in a mutually agreed process and methodology. This typically does not work for small projects because the project management and reporting overhead is typically quite high. The process then does become somewhat tedious and bureaucratic but it also results in decreasing the risk that projects will fail or go over-budget.

How important are face-to-face meetings?

Very. It becomes easier over time as you establish a good working relationship but when you're in the process of either building trust or establishing baseline processes it's all but impossible to do without face to face meetings. Be sure to factor this into your budgets!

What strategies have you used to make the partnership work?

We listened a lot. It's so easy to jet into a country as a client with all the answers. We spent a lot of time trying to understand the reality of our development team and trying to understand what issues were absolutely not worth taking a stand on.

We stopped and invested time in evaluating the situation when things went wrong. It is tempting to throw more wood onto the fire in the hope that things will speed up, this is a mistake.

We stopped, evaluated the problems with the process and then re-engineered our processes to fit with the situation. Occasionally this meant that we took on a much larger project management role then we had originally envisaged. It takes a lot of courage to stop a project dead in its tracks in order to evaluate the situation and we were under a lot of pressure to re-start as soon as possible. Don't take stopping lightly.

Is there anything you have learnt from the experience?

Many things! Too many to list... offshore development is harder then it looks.

One interesting thing we realized was that young programmers want to be Ninjas, they want exciting work, they want to go out and kill people, in other words they thrive on high risk, innovation and acts of heroism.

As a company we needed farmers, we needed people who would do steady, boring work according to fairly precise specifications and asking Ninjas to be farmers tends to generate a lot of frustration!