Author: Sameer Bhiwani, Principal Interaction Designer - Oracle Applications User Experience
If you have ever worked with a team whose members are spread across at least three different time-zones around the globe, you are likely to have encountered some of the following situations:
You give a presentation over a Web conference to five people that you have never met, and there is absolute silence when you are finished talking.
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You are responding to an e-mail chain among three stakeholders about a single small functionality, and each one responds to your initial bullet points "inline" in a different color. You have been at it for four days and you are running out of colors.
· You receive a voice mail at 2:45 a.m. for an urgent project meeting about to start in two hours. You listen to the voice mail for the first time at 9 a.m. while reading the meeting minutes.
These are just a few of the challenges people face when working in a global environment. If you are a designer or simply a visually expressive person (you know, the type of person who can't explain anything without a whiteboard and at least three different colored markers), there are even more interesting examples of running around in circles trying to communicate your ideas to the rest of the team (despite the detailed user interface specifications document that you stayed up two nights to write and illustrate).
Welcome to Innovating Globally, I will cover a range of topics that relate to global design and innovation in the enterprise applications space. This is by no means a definitive guide it is rather a set of recommended practices, real project examples, and future predictions on the nature of global design and suggestions on making it successful. Feel free to comment, critique, share stories, and give suggestions based on your own experiences.
Before delving into how and where innovation happens, let me explain what I mean by global design work and provide some examples of global teams and how they work together. Global work is not a new concept. Current industry examples include:
Outsourcing - where work is given to another company. There are many scales at which outsourcing happens, from a specific project to an entire business process. For example: An IT service company takes over product development from a software product company. A product company outsources its customer support to a support services firm or call center. A large organization outsources its finance, human resources, and travel services to different companies.
Offshoring1 - where work is given to another location within the same company. The standard model is called an "independent development center", which is located away from the company's headquarters and is responsible for a set of products or a particular market.
Global development - where the members of a team from groups like strategy, product management, design, development, testing/QA, and so on, are in different locations and time zones, but work together to execute a project.
An organization that chooses to adopt any of these models of work does so in order to optimize their costs, leverage process expertise, or provide services to multiple markets, among other reasons. In each of these models, people are usually required to work with others in different locations, time zones, and cultures. Workers on all sides of the global project face similar challenges.
While much has been written about how to become a "global" worker and overcome these challenges, we don't have much guidance on how to explore the possibilities of innovating that arise from this situation. This is what I hope to explore through this series of articles and your feedback on them.
For the past few years, I have been located in Oracle's Bangalore office and have worked on several projects that required me to work as part of a global team. Sometimes I was the only designer, and sometimes I was collaborating on the design.
Here's a recent example:
As part of a project designing a CRM application, we were required to assist the product team in creating the task flows, create a navigation model, design, test, and review the wireframes, and create prototypes. The team was located in multiple countries and across multiple time zones, as illustrated in this map.
Global CRM Application Team Locations
The project manager was located in California, and the designers were located in California, Colorado, and Bangalore. Other team members were located in Texas, Georgia, Hawaii and Germany. Other team pmembers represented a variety of different organizations within Oracle. Although team members in all locations did not have to work together on a daily basis, most project tasks involved members in at least three time-zones with meetings held two to three times a week.
1The difference between outsourcing and offshoring is debatable. Outsourcing can and does take place in the same geographical location (in which case it is not "global work") but the term usually refers to the process of getting work done from another organization in another location (off-shore). In my mind, the difference is in ownership of resource outsourcing is to another company, while offshoring is to another location of the same company.
Comments (1)
Great post. Wait till you add China based designers to the virtual distributed pool.. :)
One aspect of this topic that is of particular interest to me is how to maintain persistence and stickiness in these collaborations. Unlike in the physical workplace where the printer/water cooler/cafeteria 'glue' people and conversations together, in the virtual distributed workplace extra personal efforts are required to keep everybody connected and stay on the same page.
Looking forward to your next post on this topic!
Posted by Amit | January 17, 2008 9:57 AM
Posted on January 17, 2008 09:57