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Breaking the Barrier (Understand what is important to the client (Business…
Breaking the Barrier
Understand what is important to the client
Business goals
Technical goals
Quality
Speed
Knowledge retention
Releases
Job security
Key Ingredients for Success
1 offshore champion on client side
Flexibility from the core team to offer time overlap
Inter-office visits at early stages
In-person knowledge sharing
It is about Collaboration and not Competition
Support from leadership on both sides - Client and Cybage
Not pushing too many changes at once
Challenges we faced
Being compared to onshore team
Timezone overlap because the client team was in PST
Trust issues in the beginning
Sizing items in the beginning
Code quality issues
Lack of documented test cases
Too many processes and meetings in the beginning
What worked for us
Setting the foundation
Brought the client's lead over to India for a week
In-person knowledge sharing sessions with reverse KT presentations
Director of engineering was pro outsourcing and the onshore team reported to him
Minimizing dependencies between 2 teams
Client team worked on new features
Running independent sprints and scrum teams
Picked up maintenance module that was being deprioritized
Later chose enhancement modules that were independent
Setup for successful collaboration
Scrum of Scrums twice a week
Buddy System - pairing key people on their side with key people on our side
Transparent communication
Sharing scrum notes
Sharing sprint review demo recordings
Updating all details in project tracking system (TFS in our case)
After some months started testing each other's stories for knowledge management
Group code reviews on need basis
Tech sync-ups between architects twice a week
QA sync-ups once a week
Connecting beyond work
Understanding culture of both sides is important
Shared pictures of events and birthdays
Agile games on both sides whenever there was an inter-office travel
Not pushing in too many changes
We didn't disturb the sprint ceremonies
Made notes of process gaps and shared with the director
Brought in process improvements consulting the scrum master on client side
Tried our best to have sync-up meetings during their time-zone
Had independent sprint planning and retrospective meetings - otherwise the timezone becomes an issue
Ideal state achieved
Timezone gap turned into an advantage
Were able to work round the clock on critical issues / release
QA teams on either side can run regression independently
Moved from 12 releses in one year to 41 releases in the next year