Effective Leadership is vital for success of offshore outsourced software project management

Introduction

This article aims to look at the significance of leadership role as a Project manager in an offshore outsourced project from a balanced perspective from the various conflicting stakes in terms of diverse stake holders (Foreign client, Local management, Foreign management, local employees and support teams, foreign teams who work collaboratively etc). The reader must not read this from just perspective of offshore outsourcing as just an strategic effort for cost reduction. The article is also not about managing and leading an offshore outsourced development as part of a business partnership. Article discuss about the core importance of leadership profile of a project manager who is working remotely with his client from a far shore with any given multicultural highly diverse team in terms of skills, knowledge attitudes and technologies to achieve set of unclear business objectives which exactly have no prior proof of success.  The background scheme for this article is Sri Lanka; as an offshore software outsourced destination, where the local project managers have different challenges to overcome when dealing with short term high quality expectations of western Business Partners.

Discussion

“People think it is communication which is so crucial during managing an offshore project. But I believe that it is something which exceeds the term communication. It is the remote nature of work which is very challenging to manage without fully seeing the correct picture.”

It is a general habit in the offshore outsourced software industry that people around the globe belonging to various virtual teams are regularly having status meetings, and communications over various electronic means (emails, webdocs, phone, mobile, sms, blogs, wikis etc) with participation of various stakeholders from different parts of the world. Since this is the information age people tend to perceive these methods are very accurate ideal ways for communication while maintaining the  costs at a  minimum.  However there are some known issues of such remote communications. One complaint is that it is highly perception driven. Another charge is that decoding of a channeled message may be highly dependent on individual's capacity; hence making more vulnerabilities for miscommunication. Moreover tricky skillful people could articulate limitations of channeled communications to manipulate and persuade them as the best performers. This could negatively impact on the morality of genuine performers. Generally when you manage a team working remotely, it would take long time to understand the true comparative individual skills and performances. Realizing the correct relative performance is so important, as it help the project managers to reward the desired behaviors, and demotivate the undesired behaviors while controlling a project. Due to the tentative short term nature (max 3 years) of many offshore projects, time that takes for correctly recognizing the relative specialization of individuals, and genuinely evaluate their actual relative performances,  will consume a significant portion of Project Manager's schedule time.  If remote managers failed to identify the the true performers early, the damage could be more. It is also noted that if misleadingly wrong performers are incorrectly highlighted and rewarded, the optimum synergy which could have to be attained over deployed resources will be drastically wasted. In the technological landscape wrong resource choices could create huge technological incompatibilities. They may be surfaced during the very latter parts of the ongoing projects resulting very costly remedies. Managing This unseen illusive dogma in remote perceptual communication is very crucial towards the team motivation. That is one such critical place where you need very talented participative leaders who consistently live and die with the project life cycle while making the right decisions with least perceptual mistakes.

Today, for many project managers, a project is a set of baselines which they are trying to avoid been exceeded. On the other hand they always want to see a good burning down of product backlog. Once somebody triggers some issue: it is at the first impression; just a mere technical competency shortage, trying to fix the issue on the spot without realizing the true causes and possible effects.  With prejudiced stereotyped mindset modern project managers in the offshore software industry sometimes effectively failed to identify the realistic perceptual and political landscape of the team which is curing not in favor towards the ultimate expectations of project. It is generally accepted that such team orientations and bi polarities are motivated towards individual interests. Typically a Project Manager see the political nature of project from a different angle than what the project members see.  However as a project manager he may need to induce control as an when it is needed for advantage of meeting the project objectives. Obviously, not in his individual favor indeed. Yet, should well align in favor of original expectations of the project. Internal politics could be a double sided blade for a project manager. If properly handled politics could be beneficial. However politics is generally disastrous if a project manager failed to dilute the unfavorable political agendas at the early stages.

Knowingly or unknowing, for many cases the expectations of a project is highly defined and dependent on the way they defined and directed by the project manager. This is one reason why I would suggest a project manager to be absolutely impartial and consistent to the maximum level he can, towards original objectives ahead of various conflicting stakes of different stakeholders.  It is a common fact that a success of project is always about meeting the defined objectives during the given time provided the limited resources. However changes are inevitable. You will have to welcome them at any time at cost of various things. Provided this dynamic uncertain nature, the role of managing project is exceptionally challenging. A well compromised project will always be challenging and stressing the individual comfort zones of each stakeholders. That is another reason why a strong consistent and participative leadership is so important for success of any project to fight the frictions of evils of individual stakes. The objective should be to manipulate a unique homogeneous governance stature for every different stakeholder, making a healthy project environment with just and peace. Such culture will eliminate many evil forces which could hinder the project success.   

Challenge is comparatively intensive in the remote attire of today’s offshore outsourced business. As explained once above, identifying and knowing the stakeholders and their true interests seems to be deceiving due to the obstacles in perceived communication. Baseline driven controls may be effective when controlling and monitoring the triple constraints: Time : Costs and Scope. However the ultimate success is always depend on the people who are behind all these plans of the ultimate project. It is a known fact that, as a matter of fact according to the PMI, majority of projects are failures (80%) such that they have partially achieved the initial project objectives or otherwise they have missed the original objectives after the completion.  Even many professional partitioning project managers avoid admitting this reality as they are in a misconception that this statement questions their credibility about what they really capable of delivering. However it is very important that a genuine project manager should understand this uncontrollable uncertain nature of project, where there the general tendency is generally towards not meeting the original objectives precisely as planned. The only sustaining and genuine solution for the project manager is to communicate the tendency towards deviation of original objectives regularly to his project management office or his superiors as and when the symptoms of threats are triggered exceeding the limits of safe tolerances. For a project manager communicating the true picture in a remote work environment could be very challenging, If he is not accepted as a true project leader. Because remote receivers could perceive such circumstances as lack of the project managers’ credibility and competency of meeting the challenge. 

Conclusion

Provided above domain specific realistic issues, one could conclude that a successful offshore project manager should spur his flux of leadership in every nook and corner throughout the project during the project life cycle. The landscape of successful project Leadership is not always about tight control. There, effective leadership will include the skills of empathy, effective influencing, guts to communicate the genuine picture to the demanding management, maintain trustworthiness between conflicting groups, maintaining and communicating a fair balanced just yardstick for governance, establishing correcting project cultures, bringing inspiration, vision and motivation while earning a set of mission driven followers.