Visibility and communication with multi-shore teams

I’m currently setting up a communication plan for a new agile project which has a multi-shore component for development and testing.  In addition to having a liaison to coordinate communication between the onshore and offshore teams, there are a number of activities which can help to keep the visibility of what is going on at all stages of the project. 

Here are the examples of the different levels of visibility and the activities and tools which can help:

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Daily level

• Daily standups
• Daily or hourly build of the software including running tests
• Team self-organizes and discusses problems as they happen – in person as much as possible
• Daily question and answer Q&A on the project wiki page
• Q&A sessions on instant messenger for off-hours times for the U.S. side
• Daily posting of knowledge learned to the Knowledge sharing space on the wiki
• Some projects have on-phone or email standup reports sent to remote team members

 Weekly Level

• Weekly status report to the Project Management Organization  (PMO) to escalate and communicate issues
• Weekly test reports are sent out with testing progress and bug reports
• Iteration level ( 1- 4 weeks )
• Demo to all interested parties including customer (real working code demo). This gives real visibility about what the team has actually produced
• Retrospective.

Project Level

• Project retrospective with lessons learned and feedback to the process patterns.
• New process patterns that worked well get rolled into the pattern repository
• Project collateral is saved and archived for later reference

I’ve found that defining these communication touch-points at the beginning of a project allows better communication in the multi-shore team and exposes potential issues or roadblocks very early.

You can find  more information in a white paper on this page titled  “Applying the Agile Methodology to Increase Visibility and Reduce Risk in Cross-Shore Development”  http://perficient.com/whitepapers/