The partnership route

However, offshore doesn’t always mean outsourcing and as well as setting up a New Zealand subsidiary, we also decided to partner with a local third party as a preferable approach. This meant that, rather than focusing on its internal organisation, we are able to invest more time in developing our client relationships. With the help of the New Zealand government’s ‘Outsource 2 New Zealand’ initiative, I negotiated a partnership with Simpl, one of the bigger IT consulting and service providers in the region. A mature and stable organisation with an established management team, this partnership gives us a dedicated resource of approximately 150 highly skilled IT professionals.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

By this stage, I had already spent a lot of time with Bennett Medary, managing director of Simpl, to ensure that a partnership would be more than just a match of business interests. To make the one team methodology a success, the two organisations had to share the same approach to work and have a similar outlook so that ‘virtual’ teams would be able to work effectively together.

Both Simpl and ourselves talk passionately of striking a positive work/life balance and delivering an innovative, problem-solving culture. Perhaps most importantly, we both have an open, straight-talking approach. These values, when put into practice, are vital to the success of remote working – enabling the smooth flow of information and ensuring that if an obstacle appears, we can work together to resolve it.

This methodology extends to relationships with clients and is demonstrated by examples such as when we examined the functionality spec for a leading consumer association’s new portal. We found that there was no hope of hitting the deadlines or delivering within the budget that had been scoped out and we did not shy away from adjusting the client’s expectations. So despite having been responsible for suggesting that they delay their go-live date by several months, we now have a strong, trust-based relationship with this client because we enabled the association to maintain its exacting standards and integrity by not promoting a launch date that couldn’t be met.

One team methodology in practice

The natural affinity between ourselves and Simpl is encased in a framework of systems and processes, which were developed to enable us to operate effectively as a single team.

Our head of project delivery, Ian Storer, is well versed in the approach. “When development is handed over from one team to the other, you have to make sure there are no gaps, no misunderstandings about what has been done and why. This is why the one team methodology works so well for offshoring: you have to ensure that the whole team has a clear vision of the overall project so that everyone knows what they have to do and why,” said Storer.

Due to the nature of our work, we need to use a number of communication mechanisms to manage information flow. A pivotal part of this is the shared development that is used for project management, development and all related communications. This is based on the Microsoft Sharepoint Framework. By working from one central location, the potential for information falling between the two halves of the team due to the physical and temporal distance between them is negligible.

We have to admit that there have been changes over time to how the UK and New Zealand teams work together – but it’s more a shift in emphasis rather than the process. Originally, there were frequent conference calls for regular activities such as handovers, which could be an inefficient use of time. Of course phone calls still play an important part in how we work together, but now they tend to be reserved for when there is the need for specific discussion or decision-making.

The portal is now used as the principle mechanism for communicating and its success is down to the “well structured approach and rigorous fulfilment of the overall project,” as recognised by Brian Harte, general manager at Conduit.