Engage: Getting the Most Out of Indian Off-Shore Teams

Yesterday ThinkPlank led a course called Engage at Intellect for clients who want to find more effective ways to work with teams in India.

It’s a big subject, and the participants represented a range of structural issues. Off-shore teams can be a mixed bag — some are vendors, some are Indian technologists working for other companies, and some are captives (part of the European companies that simply sit off-shore).

In addition, the course’s participants varied in their experience with off-shoring. For example, one had been working with Indian teams for eight years and signed up for the course to ensure he wasn’t missing any tricks. On the other end of the spectrum, a client arrived who was overwhelmed with the information involved in choosing his first vendor.

Everyone was present because of problems with managing off-shore teams — although everyone also agreed that managing is challenging as a general rule and only gets more complicated with time and national differences.

Ved began by going into some depth on India’s cultural, historical, and religious contexts to give the course’s participants some clearer perspective on the Indian attitudes toward communication, deadlines, time, organisational structure, authority, and an impressive array of other personal and political issues that effect work performance.

Pragna went on to discuss organisational structure and reporting issues that might interfere with overall results, and Ved then went through some common problems — and solutions — to management across continents.

The final exercise involved an actor in India taking a call from the group who had to explain an overview of specs for a new product.

Everyone seemed happy with what they learned, particularly Ved’s cultural context because there was a lot that was completely new to them. In addition, all the participants said they picked up some ideas on how to improve existing problems that seemed unsolvable.

It seemed the biggest challenge for participants (and us) is that it’s difficult to address specific scenarios in a day-long class with such a wide variety of experience and needs. Next time, we’ll probably break up