Offshore Development - Communication Skills and Reporting to Superiors

This article is mainly from recent feelings. Really feel that for the form of offshore development, communication skills are very important. However, when you can't communicate, or you can't convince the other party, and the communication is ineffective, you must report it to your superiors.

Our team had a problem recently. There is a group with a total of 3 people, and 2 of them have resigned. This is a very big personnel change for a group. For a maintenance project to suddenly have a 67% turnover rate, that's no small thing.

Whether it is onshore or offshore, they are very concerned about this matter. In addition to urgently arranging personnel to take over their jobs, they also spend a lot of time and manpower to analyze the root cause of their departure.

Why do you need to analyze the root cause of leaving? This is to avoid such emergencies in the future. If you don't figure out why, how can you avoid such problems in the future? Regarding the root cause analysis, it is a continuous, painful, and obligatory thing, which will be shared in detail later.

The leaders on the team had many conversations with those who left, and finally got a sense of why.

There are 3 people in this group, but there is a lot of maintenance work. In terms of workload, this group should be 4 people. However, since onshore has already signed a contract with the customer, the number of people cannot be increased, so the work pressure of these three people is particularly high because they have to do the work that was originally done by four people.

In fact, they are already very good. 3 people have done it for a year and a half without any mistakes. This is already very rare for maintenance projects. However, the leader on the onshore is not a fuel-efficient lamp, he is very picky, and he often interferes with the work of the offshore. As a result, the relationship between onshore and offshore has been very tense for the past year and a half.

For example, when there are too many tasks on a certain day, and the leader of the offshore wants to adjust a certain task, the leader of the onshore will definitely ask: Why do you adjust?
Then the two sides began to send and receive emails, and it took an hour to finally adjust. As a result, other tasks at hand were delayed. After a few times like this, the leader of the offshore has no expectation of adjusting the task.

The leader of onshore often says: I think this task will be completed in 1 hour. But in fact it should take 4-5 hours. The two sides also debated this issue frequently and spent a lot of time. After a long time, the leader of the offshore is not in the mood to discuss it again.

Due to the long-term load and the attitude of onshore, the leader of offshore finally felt that the group was "hopeless", so he decided to leave.

Indeed, we can see from the above that the leader of onshore has his own problems, in our words, he has "character problems". I also feel that the main responsibility this time is onshore--whether they admit it or not.
But from what we can control offshore, have we really done it all? Let's take a look.

All sorts of nitpicking and random meddling at work about onshore.
After analysis, it was found that the email communication between onshore and offshore in this group was basically person-to-person. Rarely add a mailing group to CC. This leads to a lot of things that only two of the people involved know and no one else knows.

There were all kinds of quarrels, debates, dissatisfaction, etc. between them. Others couldn't see this email, so there was no way to know the situation immediately.

Again, this is often the case in communication emails:
Offshore people want to rest on Friday, so they want to move Friday's tasks to Wednesday, and then work overtime on Wednesday.
When applying for overtime, people at onshore will question why overtime is required on Wednesday? When the work adjustment on Friday was announced, the people at onshore questioned again. The content of the work on Friday has not yet been determined, and it is meaningless to work overtime on Wednesday. As a result, the overtime work on Wednesday was finally cancelled, and the rest on Friday was also normal.
This will give onshore a very bad impression: your plans for the job are unreliable.

So it's about communication skills.
For us professionals, it is common sense to use email to communicate. Needless to say, the most important thing is that the email can be used as an important credential.
As the so-called word of mouth is useless.

Then when using email to communicate, we must also pay attention to who the email is sent to, who the CC is for, and who the BCC is for. These are all very critical.
Like the quarrel and debate between offshore and onshore this time, emails must not be sent to only two people. At least let the whole group see it, but also let the managers of both sides see: Look, we discussed such a trivial matter for an hour, what do you think of this issue?

Second, the content of communication must also be paid attention to. It doesn't make sense to express dissatisfaction with the other person in the email. You may be furious here, but people may still be leisurely, so it's not worth it!

No matter what kind of thing, we must expound our own truth and speak according to the facts. Don't get angry, it's not necessary.

For example, for a task, onshore said: It should be done within an hour, I think it is fine, it must be done.
After analysis, we came to the conclusion that it takes 5 hours. At this time, are you going to shout angrily: onshore, this group of pigs! Can't think with your brain? !
So I immediately replied to the email: No, we need 5 hours for this, and we can't finish it in 1 hour.

Onshore also immediately replied to the email: Why can't it be done in 1 hour? please explain.

You are so angry at this time: Does this still need an explanation? ! Then, holding back his anger, he wrote some reasons in the email.
Onshore may ask you questions again, because when you are angry, the organization of the content is not clear enough, and he still does not understand.

The above just reproduces a real scene of onshore/offshore communication.
What should the correct approach look like?

After analysis, we came to the conclusion that it must take 5 hours. So reply to the following email:
--------------------------------------------- ---------  
   After careful analysis, this task takes 5 hours.
   Reasons:
      1. Build environment: 1 hour
      2. Construct production environment data: 1 hour 3. Write       verification
      code and deployment: 2    hours contact me ------------------------------------------------ ------ I guess onshore won't make any sense anymore. If onshore has objections, such as why does the third step take 2 hours? We can subdivide the task again and give onshore instructions. In short, keep calm and speak according to the facts, so that there is no pressure to communicate. Remember the adjustment for Wednesday overtime mentioned above? Yes, there is nothing wrong with speaking based on facts, but only if you are giving the other person the real facts.












For example, in the above example, "Write verification code and deploy: 2 hours", if this time is inaccurate, after onshore's further questioning, this time is adjusted to 1 hour, then onshore will follow up on all the time. question.

Therefore, in general, in terms of communication, the first thing is to maintain a peaceful mind and speak with facts. Secondly, what is sent to the other party must be real and analyzed. Don't think about it randomly. If the other party finds that your conclusions are flawed, trust will be lost, causing communication problems again.

If the conclusion drawn above is that this task takes 5 hours without any problems, onshore is still picky and questionable. It caused us to spend 2 hours explaining onshore's doubts, which had a great impact on our emotions. In addition, the task at hand was delayed.

What should I do in this situation? That's the next thing to say: reporting to your superiors.

When onshore still insists on his own ideas after hard communication and the two sides cannot reach an agreement, don't let yourself bear all the negative emotions.
Be sure to report these matters to your superiors, and let them deal with this matter—because the superiors speak more forcefully.

For example, in the above example, if the task time is adjusted multiple times, and each time our judgment is correct, and every time we have to spend a lot of time explaining to the onshore people, we should judge that, There is a problem on the onshore side: the onshore leader cannot correctly judge the time of the task, which affects the work of the offshore.

Likewise, the content of the report should not be emotional and should be factual. For example, it could look like this:
---------------------------------------- -------------
Background:
    Discuss with the leader of onshore today the time required for a certain task. It takes 1 hour to judge the leader of onshore.
    We judged to be 5 hours. Similar things have happened many times.

Problem:
    At present, the leader of onshore seems to be unable to correctly judge the time required for a task.

Impact:
    Every time we need to spend several hours explaining to the leader of onshore, it takes our normal working time and
    affects our work.

Expectation:
    I hope to communicate with the manager of onshore to improve the ability of the leader of onshore.
-------------------------------------------------- ----

Report such content to the superior, and the superior will communicate with the people onshore, I believe the problem will be solved.
The leader of our team who left this time is precisely because all the problems are borne by himself. In fact, it has already exceeded his ability, but there is no formal report to his superiors, resulting in problems that cannot be solved for a long time. .

The cooperation between onshore and offshore in offshore development is indeed a very complicated thing. Communicate and trust each other in the right way. There is no perfect partner in the world, but poor communication and incorrect approach can lead to more serious problems.