Hugh Walcott inttroduced himself to me in New Zealand on a recent roadshow I was doing for Borland. He handed me a copy of this article from CIO magazine.
A correction though. The book A Practical Guide... was not written by me or Peter. Steve Palmer is the lead author of that book.
 | A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development (The Coad Series) author: Stephen R. Palmer,John M. Felsing asin: 0130676152 |
Lessons From India
I quite liked this article and as someone who has spent most of his professional life in India, would like to make a few points here.
1. One of the most important documents that we found we had to create was a "Communication Plan" to ensure that the right team was involved in the right meetings.
Too often, we used to get that wrong and then all the problems mentioned about messages not getting passed used to happen. Usually, this was because there was no point in passing on a detailed teachnical problem to a person involved in the management of the project. Such people had neither the time nor the bandwidth to search out and pass on technical information. So, we had to keep these people on separate calls, or separate segments of a call.
2. One of the major problems that many Indian developers have (and I am not saying that it happened in this case) is the use of four-letter words and profanity in a daily/ weekly call. Usually, this is not apparent, because in face-to-face or one-to-one calls, both parties are reasonably comfortable with the words being used. However, when a senior person joins in, or sometimes, when a lady is present in the daily call, I noticed the same people getting very uncomfortable and agreeing to whatever was said to close an 'embarrassing' discussion. Usually, none of the commitments made in such a situation get recorded, forget being completed.
Wonder if anyone had faced these issues when development was outsourced.
Regards
G Krishnamurthy
New Delhi, India