One benefit of my job is that I get to talk to people from hundreds of companies every year, and the people I work with talk to even more people. In recent discussions I've seen a disturbing trend emerging -- disturbing because it's so common and because the effects are so easily predictable.
With the economic challenges many companies are facing, many companies have imposed travel restrictions that in practice are working out to "zero travel." I understand the value of this as a general cost containment measure. However, we are seeing increasing numbers of companies that have also applied this travel restriction to their offshore projects -- meaning no one from their domestic group can spend time with their offshore groups, and no one from the offshore groups can travel to their domestic locations.
The problem is this: Offshore development is challenging enough when you do everything right. Face-to-face time is an essential part of successful multi-site development. Video conferencing, web conferencing, etc. are all useful supplements to face-to-face time, but there is no good substitute for meeting the people you work with in person, meeting their families, having dinner and drinks together, playing soccer together -- that is, getting to know the other people as human beings.
When crunch time hits, teams are a lot more effective when they're working with their "friends in another country" than when they're working with "those stupid offshore idiots who never understand our designs or requirements."
One executive put it this way: "The half life of trust is 6 weeks," where trust is based on face-to-face communication. As face-to-face time drops, the consequences are easy to predict:
- Significantly increased communication mistakes
- Problems in requirements, designs, test cases, etc. due to #1
- Significantly increased defects due to #1 and #2
- Increased friction between domestic vs. offshore groups due to #1-#3
- Reduced trust due to all the above
- More "us vs. them" thinking
- Less ability to work through problems as they arise due to #1-#6
- Overall reduction in effectiveness of the offshore operation due to all the above
The overarching issue here is that the consideration that most commonly causes companies to go offshore is cost reduction, so it's not hard to understand why companies that go offshore to reduce costs would also eliminate travel in these challenging times for the same reason. Unfortunately that combination creates a "perfect storm" of factors that over time will render offshore development unworkable.
It's been a few years since I've seen a widespread pattern like this where the consequences were both so damaging and so predictable. In all the companies Construx has worked with, I can't think of a single case in which offshore development has been successful for a company that didn't commit to significant face time between teams at different sites. If the current travel moratorium lasts 3-6 months, most companies will probably be able to recover. If it lasts much longer, I think we'll start to see companies "reevaluating their offshore strategies" -- and overlooking the fact that offshoring stopped working when their people stopped traveling.