One of the biggest roadblocks for local companies considering offshoring is a concern about time zone differences. Although 80% of Fortune 500 companies are now saving money by building offshore development teams in India, most businesses that are yet to dip their toe in the water claim concerns about collaboration and communication when team members aren’t running on the same schedule.
What's The Time zone Overlap With India?
When compared with UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), how much overlap is there between New Zealand/Australia and India in the normal working day?
Take a look at our key locations in relation to UTC:
In an average 9-5 working day, here's how much overlap each time zone has with IST:
When you work with Double Yolk developers (Yolkers), they are happy to adjust their start times to allow for a larger crossover. So businesses in New Zealand can work with a 2-hour crossover, and in Australia there's up to a 4-hour crossover.
What if you're not in any of these locations? Many of our Yolkers can work on a flexible basis to accommodate the time zones of other countries.
Ways To Make The Most Of The Time Overlap
Having a globally-dispersed team means that people are working on your business around the clock. While you sleep, the world’s best tech talent is speeding up your rate of innovation and development.
The businesses offshoring with the most success use that 2-4 hour timezone overlap smartly. This is your time to hand over processes to your offshore team, to ask and answer questions, and to ensure everyone is on the same page. To make sure your team operates smoothly – without the need for you to respond to any international calls or emails out-of-hours.
In our experience, an agile methodology such as Sprint and Kanban is the best approach, although not the only one.
Sprint Methodology
One of the largest barriers stopping companies from offshoring is the concern of whether the individuals will integrate well.
71% of businesses follow the sprint model to ensure projects move forward efficiently, but it’s also a great way to manage external teams. The nature of the sprint approach (setting a period of time in which to complete projects) is a perfect match for the offshore model.
Here’s how many of our clients make it work for them.
Host daily stand-ups, sprint planning and retrospective calls with developers in the afternoon.
Schedule meetings with your offshore team at the beginning of your shared working day. It helps to get all members of the team aligned with each project early on, and this is the perfect time to explain details of the upcoming development sprint.
Set your meeting (the scrum) to 15 minutes or less to avoid de-railing the topic. Plan the sprint during this meeting, so discuss things like:
- How long the sprint cycle will be
- The goal of each sprint/set KPIs to work towards
- The features the development will focus on
- The tools that will be key
- Assign roles to each team member
- How teams will communicate
Welcoming questions and input from your internal and offshore teams will ensure complete clarity before development and testing processes begin.
Conduct a sprint retrospective meeting
As each sprint comes to a close, it’s important to host a post-development meeting. Encourage everyone to be honest about how the process was, so you can gain valuable feedback for the next sprint cycle.
In your retrospective meeting, cover:
- What went well about the sprint
- What didn't go so well - ask team members what they'd do differently
- Discuss how you could implement those changes
Kanban Methodology
An IT team at Microsoft was the first to implement kanban systems in the software industry back in 2004. Favoured for visualising processes and maximising efficiency, many business leaders aren’t sure how kanban can be put into practice with offshore teams.
The key is by replacing physical visual boards with digital ones. Simply using collaboration tools to track the progress of development projects helps offshore teams stay in-the-loop, for straightforward coordination that enables international teams to work on development, even while you sleep.
Ask Double Yolk
When businesses use the timezone overlap for handover purposes, managing an offshore team becomes a lot less daunting.
Of course, you don’t want to rush into things. If you have questions about hiring or managing an offshore team in India, get in touch with Double Yolk. Our team would be happy to lead you in the right direction.
