Prologue
Over a period of 30 years I’ve worked for a wide range of companies in the Information Technology ecosystem. The work almost always dealt with sales and client relationship management. I started my career selling fabric for suits and shirts in Southern India and then moved to computer hardware. Deliberately, over time, I covered software, professional services, management consulting, outsourcing and more.
I’ve lived in New York for 26 years and have worked for Unisys, DEC, HP, KPMG/BearingPoint, MphasiS, Sapient and now DataArt. Over the course of this time I’ve been fortunate to observe and engage with varied cultures, their approach to client relationships through their sales and delivery organizations and management styles. There is enough material for a book, one that would appeal to a fairly limited audience so I’d like to focus on a broader subject, the impact of culture on communications in these organizations.
Perhaps a little back ground would help.
History
I was born in Bombay, and so stubbornly, I choose to keep calling it that despite the newer and more politically correct “Mumbai”. My family moved to London when I was four years old and I grew up in a tough neighborhood called Tottenham till the age of 16 when my father retired from the Indian High Commission. We returned to India and I went to college in Trivandrum and then Nagercoil (relatively small towns at the southern tip of India).
My first technology job was selling computer systems, data loggers and closed loop controllers to anyone who would buy them in Pune, a fast growing city just outside Bombay. I sold for an Indian conglomerate called DCM (they also manufactured textiles, edible oils, and engineering goods) and competed with equally young firms like Wipro and Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL). I moved to
New York City in 1984 and have never left nor really wanted to.
I genuinely enjoy meeting people and am very outgoing, all of which helped in developing perspectives on communications. My observations are about what seem to be differences in communication style and behavior when working with a predominantly Eastern European (EE) operation Vs an Indian one. I’m guilty of sweeping generalizations drawn from inadequate data and limited samples but they are merely my observations from the trenches.
Observations of Cultural Influence in Communications between Clients and their Software Development Outsourcing Partners
The main players in these observations are the client, the front office and the delivery organizations. Obviously, in every firm, the degree to which these entities have impact on each other will be different based on leadership culture, geography, competitive environment, and countless other factors. In some firms, the front office is well integrated with the delivery arm and in some cases not. Regardless, certain process dynamics exist between these entities from a functional perspective, and if these are managed well, will promote greater efficiency for everyone, especially the client. There are as many observations as there are people involved that can be made here, but to list them all without a focus would be dilutive. I believe communications to be of paramount importance and so focus on the influence of culture on communications.
Clients want to get work done with a reliable partner who will do everything possible to achieve client success. Some clients have deep experience, earned through painful lessons about how to manage an outsourced service and the providers of that service. Clients perceive value from partners who align with their goals and evaluate in terms of competence, commitment and efficiency metrics. They want to see openness and transparency in the work on their projects and abhor surprises.
Most provider companies get the right “client focus” words into the mission and vision statements. No one wants to do a bad job for clients. What is interesting is how organizations behave when it becomes difficult /expensive to do the right thing. This is not an attribute of solely of either the EE or Indian firms but it is where the rubber meets the road and says a lot about how you look at your business relationships. All I can say is that there is a willingness to take a longer term view of business relationships by firms who are not driven by quarterly metrics. Small or privately help firms seem to be able to do the right thing more easily and without a lot of hand wringing.
Anyone who has spent time in this business knows there is always some level of dynamic tension between sales and delivery organizations. This tension serves to keep everyone honest about what is promised and what can be delivered and if communicated correctly will set appropriate expectations for everyone. The front office sales organization is typically an onsite US based operation and also an important, if not primary, interface for the client. They are usually responsible for being first contact and introducing new clients to the rest of the firm. The majority of the firm is the more remote delivery organization and its operations teams. They can be anywhere, Bangalore, Delhi, Bombay, Chennai, Moscow,
St. Petersburg or a host of other centers. If communication is not in synch between these two groups bad things happen. My experience in turning around distressed projects taught me many things about what can go wrong. They are almost always because of bad communications between the client and delivery organization or between onsite and offshore delivery teams or all three entities.
Communication Traits in Indian Firms
Based on an amalgamation of experiences with firms that used software development centers in India, a majority seemed to exhibit communication challenges based on rigid hierarchies, not wanting to lose face and an aversion to saying “no” or delivering bad news. I see the advantage of hierarchy in large development organizations but if the environment restricts the flow of information in either direction between the top and bottom there is a real problem. If people do not feel empowered to speak out, ideas are stifled, delays and quality problems can be invisible till too late. Secondly, how organizations deal with bad news is important. Inherently, I think rank and file people in Indian firms are less likely to speak up because of their adherence to hierarchy.
Many are not comfortable in saying “no” or delivering bad news. In fact Malayalam, the language of Kerala and my mother tongue, does not have a single word for “no”. You can communicate “no” but it takes at least a couple of words. I have witnessed unnecessary delays in flagging issues because people did not speak up, in part because they were either not listened to or did not think it was their job. When teams are open to admitting problems and actively communicate to stakeholders, there are fewer surprises and often solutions emerge from the “included” extended team which can lead to better outcomes.
A vivid example of how things can go horribly wrong involved badly sold expectations, an aggressive project timeline to accommodate a client budget limit, and a fixed time deal. The firm’s development center was is in Mumbai. Compounding this perfect storm, the firm assigned an inexperienced onsite PM to be the point person. The offshore development team was very unhappy that they were immediately under the gun from day one through no fault of their own. The sales team disappeared to chase the next deal.
Instead of throwing down a big flag when he saw delays, the PM felt that they would somehow be handled by the offshore team leads. He continued to accept changes to scope from the client well into the project and instead of speaking up or even communicating them to the delivery team, he kept these changes to himself in a drawer, perhaps to shield the development team from more anxiety and stress. Seven months later, at the User Acceptance Testing milestone, he delivered code to the end user business client that would not run at all , not even past the login. and could not have passed any standard of QA that we as professionals, would not laugh at.
During the course of the project some people on his team spoke up but no one in the management team was listening. The relationship managers were not engaged nor watching for opportunities to support the success of the engagement. Morale had gone through the shredder as people felt powerless as they watched the train wreck unfold. I worked on two other projects that had suffered similar fates. The root cause and patterns were the same – huge gaps in communications and perspectives based on cultural blind spots. So I decided to teach a course in improving transparency, speaking up, how to say “no” directly and politely, and delivering bad news in a timely manner. It was designed for anyone who was dealing with the client or even communicating internally amongst different functional units. I used role play as a vehicle to give everyone a chance to examine and pick apart what works and doesn’t work when it comes to communicating intra group and with the client. It was based on the simple premise that transparency and focus are good and keep everyone honest while promoting competence. Clients want to know when things are not going to happen as planned because they have often made promises to their stakeholders too. When the vendor delays communicating a delay, no one is able to reset expectations and there is disappointment throughout the stakeholder community and consequently everyone is unhappy.
In the instance of the project manager who delivered bad code to testing, he knew it was all going bad but deferred the pain of telling the client till the bitter end. Perhaps he was waiting for a miracle right at the end but they are so very rare. Or that the client would push back delivery for some reason of their own. Whatever the case, the course was very successful and mighty entertaining.
Communication in Vendors-SMEs (
Eastern Europe)
On the other hand, my experience with Eastern European IT firms so far, suggest that employees are more than willing to tell the client when they think the client is mistaken or pursues a bad course of action. As a consequence, EE firms can be seen as more resistant to client direction until they have fully bought into the logic or rationale of a decision.
I haven’t seen hesitation with anyone in my current organization (DataArt) when making their views and opinions known, regardless of their position. The people I work with seem to be able to defend their respective positions using logic, facts and a dry humor. Discussions can get colorful and many perspectives are aired. Some clients can find this disconcerting if they are accustomed to development partners who like to huddle and form consensus opinions before engaging the client. Perceptions of abruptness during discussions are not uncommon but are really based on a culture that does not take offense to directness and places tremendous value on intellectual rigor.
I hear clients say all the time that they want partners to be much more than obedient and efficient builders – though efficient would be very good thing. They see real value when partners are more than sounding boards, when they validate ideas and approaches and bring their own unique ideas to the table. I see the team I work with do this all the time and when I hear a client comment “that’s a good idea, I hadn’t thought of that” or “I want your opinion on this” – it’s music to my ears. A clear example of directness and insight was when a senior architect responded succinctly to a proposed client technology framework that “this won’t work as designed”. Of course, he went on to explain why, which resulted in a dialog that lead to a better design. Or when working with a travel services client, the client architect says I am happy that you “get it” after evaluating several approaches to building a booking engine that were validated against our experience.
I enjoy being the only non-EE person in my office and understand the warm dynamic of the firm and its lack of overt hierarchy. You can rely on everyone to have an opinion and ideas are talked through without rancor. There is a healthy air of openness and people seem to thrive in it. One hears nay’s and yay’s in seemingly reasonable balance during the work day.
Clients who understand the cultural basis of communications can manage either the directness of the EE firms or the subtleties of the Indian style to their benefit. With the Indian firms it is important to ask the right questions that allow for them to communicate bad news when it happens, gracefully. For EE firms the client should choose an alternative to the Borg Collective’s “resistance is futile” approach and understand that they can get real insight and buy-in from taking an extra step of vetting the logic and rationale of key decisions with questioning minds.
Girish Nair is a Senior Vice President of Business Development at DataArtGirish.Nair@dataart.com
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