Tackle The Time Zones Efficiently While Outsourcing Your IT Task to India

Outsourcing IT tasks has always proved to be extremely fruitful and efficient. Though time zones can be a major challenge, but they also give the benefit of doing the work at client’s night time and deliver it the next day morning. This round the clock model often helps to speed up the work process and reduce the response time, thereby enhancing the customer service. But this outsourcing process requires great collaboration and additional coordination to avoid any extra cost, rework, misunderstanding and delayed communication.

Why businesses still prefer software outsourcing across different time zones?

Software development requires several technical, commercial and financial factors to be considered before it is built. Internet and technology advancements have helped a lot in the communication means across different geo-locations and capitalize on real talent. The last decade has seen countries like Israel, India, Phillippines, Singapore, Russia and etc, excel in information technology and competent software engineers have helped to undertake offshore outsourcing projects at quite a reasonable cost.

Besides being helpful for the software developers, outsourcing to such countries have also proved helpful for employers who are willing to use their time effectively and reach out to the market faster. Distributed software development is often beneficial for modular applications where separate components and elements can be developed independently and outsourced from different locations.

How can you overcome the differences in time zones?

FOLLOW THE SUN- This is the work model that comes into act where there are some time zone differences. Generally, the offshore team conducts the work during their client’s bed time. This model has helped to reduce the overall response and product development time.

Consider overlap time:

While outsourcing your software development task to your partner, it is important to consider the overlap time for the teams to exchange real time information. You can find a common collaboration period that is at least 1-2 hours so that you can resolve any project dependency, conduct demos, clarify requirements and even gather feedbacks. During this time, both the teams can organize daily scrum meeting and also discuss any project issues.

Consider good tools and technologies:

It is also important that your team has a common working space to share, collaborate on any data or information that they need to work on. You can choose to work on the same working environment with the client team and use tools like Assembla, Microsoft TFS, Rally and etc. For communication, you can take advantage of instant message tools like Microsoft Office Communicator, Skype and etc. Video conference for meetings helps to increase the trust level between both the teams.

Follow agile methodologies:

Agile practice is the key ingredient of service agencies. Following agile Scrum requires daily meetings. The daily meetings with your offshore outsourcing team helps to understand the requirements clearly, make any changes instantly in the project without delay and share information with the global team easily. Continuous integration also helps to boost team productivity and complete the work within the stipulated time period.

Embrace flexibility:

While outsourcing your IT task to offshore companies, you may face some inconveniences due to time differences. It may so happen that your team might have to stay late for a meeting or get up early for some work. But if your communication is proactive and you can efficiently schedule your working hours with your offshore team, then you can easily benefit the most.

In brief, I can say that there are various ways to overcome the challenges of time zone differences. Handling them by defining appropriate working process and taking the advantage of some collaborative technologies will help you to stay organized and save both time and money.