- 90% of the tweets I receive have a link to a web site someone "discovered". Am I really supposed to open them all?#metatweet #
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You have surely noticed that I have been very quiet in the past year. It is because I was writing my first book. This has taken most of my writing energy. The topic is very close to what I am talking about here: human dynamics inside the context of a software project. I present a whole framework for project optimisation. The product is named: Project Cycle Optimisation (PCO).
At the Develop conference, in Brighton, on the 15th July 2010, I’ll be talking about actions that can be taken by Studios (and in most cases Publishers) to win more projects. One of these moves is definitely to work on the requirements. This is why I have selected this chapter to be published on that occasion. If you are interested in getting this sample chapter (64 pages), please get in touch with me. We only print 100 of it, so hurry up in case you wish to get one. The easiest is to leave a message here and I get an email immediately saying you did so. I’ll get in touch with you. Oh by the way, the full set of Project Cycle Optimization principles will be comprehensively covered in the final book:
Most of the book is already written.
The UK government, in its attempt to save money (like almost all European government) has scrapped the Games industry tax relief. Clearly, the industry is in shock and the different interviews available online from people representing the Games are using words such as betrayal. It is not for me to judge. Britain’s studios have produced some of the world’s biggest selling games titles for over 15 years. Personally, I have played more games during the recession than at any point in my life. A good game eases the economic misery and they are still fantastic value for money. I’ll be continuing my unwavering support of the UK’s creative industries. We pack a big punch for a small island – but we all know that! Anyway, my point here is that the time has come for more efficiency, better projects, risk reduction, etc. But the Games industry is not precisely working like most other industries. It has strong specificities that make applying traditional recipes for software efficiency more difficult. It also has very strong structural reasons to have disturbed human dynamics such as the ones I talk about in other articles of this blog. Communication of clear information between people and between sub-teams is a permanent challenge. Managing expectation properly between Producers and Studios is always challenging. Cross-cultural communication is a daily reality with all its difficulties. Last but not least, the transition of the industry from Waterfall to Agile processes such as Scrum is not an easy move (it’s never been easy for any industry anyway). To contribute my effort in support of the industry I will be speaking at the DEVELOP Conference in Brighton next month (13-15 July 2010) and taking out a stand to provide advice. I’d love to see you there. If you can’t make it just post a comment with your email on this blog and I’ll send you a copy of my talk on PowerPoint. http://www.develop-conference.com/
Picasso once said: “By the age of eight I could paint like Raphael, but it has taken me another 60 years to learn to paint like a child.” What Picasso was getting at here was that in order to innovate you have to know the processes and rules very well. In fact you don’t even want to know them but you want to live them, breathe by them, make them automatic/reflex. In the software development arena (e.g. the Games industry) do we sometime suffer from not knowing the processes and rules well enough before breaking the rules? I would say so. In my experience, I have been confronted in numerous situations where projects were in danger of failing. When asked about the reasons for being in danger (completed over 50 projects), more often then not I find the following issues (list non-exhaustive):
Most of the time, when I am looking for the reasons of these issues, I am finding answers such as: “Nobody really applies the process, why would we? We are better the way we do.”, or “No real time for testing by the book, let’s just apply common sense and save money”, or “We are agile, we don’t need documentation.” Ad infinitum. Am I missing something here? Because to me this looks a lot like laziness hidden behind the ultimate excuse: creativity! Let’s think about IT !
Maybe I will start by answering something I already hear coming in your mind: “that surely won’t apply to me since I’ve been working in UK for XX years.” Well, I am far from convinced it is the case. If you are yourself a foreigner in the workplace you live in, at best you are adapted and work on adaptation mode without knowing, but deep inside there are elements of yourself that probably remain what you were educated as.
Now what, will you ask? Fair enough cultures are making us different and we kind of knew that. Well then: what are the consequences on our business relationships? will I ask in return. So, I would like to present a situation you could encounter when working with foreigners and the potential consequences of misreading the foreigner’s behaviour. I will aim at illustrating the different layers within the fictional scenario. I will talk about a job interview.
On his/her side, the interviewee will carefully select clothes, time for arrival, general attitude, etc. In this situation, we have several cultural layers involved: So, you could have an interviewee arriving in suit and tie but with tattoos and face piercings, an interviewer relaxed in casual clothes, an interviewee always looking straight into the eyes when talking, an interviewer asking about a 1 year gap in the CV. What do we have to think about that?
Let’s think about IT!
As we all know, outsourcing off-shore is a complex decision to make for a company. The reasons for doing so are generally cost saving of course, but also the hope to get the development happen faster due to a bigger and more readily available team. When you have at last made the decision to do it, comes the difficult question of where to do it. By where I mean of course what company to use but I also mean where geographically. I’ll put myself in the shoes of a UK company as this is where I am working. So, you are based in UK and you want to use the services of people living in a remote cheaper country. Will you go in India as many have done? Will you go in Russia? Will you prefer to get closer with Eastern Europe? What about China? Then come more elements in the equation: language, time difference, reputation, process certification, etc. These are difficult parameters and indeed having 2h difference with the off-shore team surely needs a different logistic than having 8 or 10. Some argue that a big difference allows a team to work when the other is not and some will say that having a small difference allows better communication. All these questions and answers are valid, of course. But I would like to add one that is rarely taken into account: how will we get on with the local culture?
I cannot really present the whole content of the workshop I delivered but I can still present some elements of it. First of all, I shall introduce the concept of cultural dimension. There are many schools of thought regarding what elements are really describing a culture. Some like Edward T. Hall in his series of books started with Beyond Culture will emphasise on things such as time and space management. For instance, some cultures will have a more linear way to deal with time like the Germans (one task at a time) and some will have more a multi-task approach like South American countries or even France. For space, you will have also big difference like for instance simple but important things such as open and closed space. Americans will feel better in open spaces and open doors when Germans (T. Hall worked extensively on Americans and Germans) will prefer closed doors. 1/ Power Distance, or the way the society is dealing with power, equality and inequality. 2/ Individualism/Collectivism, or how the society is dealing with individuality inside the group. 3/ Masculinity/Feminity, or how the society is dealing with gender and their roles within the group. 4/ Uncertainty Avoidance, or: is the unknown and unexpected dangerous? 5/ Long/Short Term orientation, or what do you value best: now or tomorrow? Each of these dimension deserve a whole article if not a book like the Hofstedes did. But if you take my word for a moment that these are indeed valuable ways of describing a culture, then you might be interested in knowing where you stand on these compared to your offshore selected service provider. That’s what I did for my customer and I can present the result and discuss it in here. The following diagram presents the relative positioning of UK and Romania on 4 of the 5 dimensions (the studies have not included Romania in the Short/Long term Orientation but it is likely to be comparable with UK and the rest of Europe). This is the result of different studies presented in Cultures and Organisations. I have to insist on an important point: these studies have been conducted on 74 countries and the results are relative to each country included in the study. The maximum scores in each dimension is around the 100 mark; sometimes below, sometimes above. You need to check the next diagram to get the full picture.
The following diagram presents the rank within the study of UK and Romania for each dimension. The number of countries included in the study is 74. Therefore, for each dimension there is a number 1 and a number 74 which represent the min and max. Once again, this position is therefore relative and it is perfectly possible to find a country outside of the study which would score far above or even below in a dimension. But 74 countries is not a bad panel considering that the number of countries in the world is about 195 (open to debate as it seems but out of the scope of this article).
I hope that my explanations about the diagrams and dimensions are clear enough. I am here summarising hundreds of pages of studies and books. If you find it confusing, let me know and I’ll try to clarify. If you have only one thing to check in these diagrams, it is the difference between the red and the blue on each dimension. The bigger the difference the bigger …well the difference in culture. What do we learn from this diagram? Beyond the details of each dimension, we learn that British and Romanian cultures stand quite far from each other on 4 of the 5 dimensions. We learn that misunderstanding is very likely to happen at different levels. In short, we learn that if Romania is closed geographically to UK both people are not so close. Several types of misunderstanding can happen on the project and we’d rather know beforehand then improvise during the course of the project. I’ll take one dimension to illustrate what it means in real life terms for a project. If you consider the Power Distance Index (PDI) we see that Great Britain scores 35 in 63rd position, and Romania scores 90 in 7th position. If we understand that Power index, within a company could be related to the level of power the boss has on the subordinates, then you understand that a British manager will expect his staff to speak their mind. On the other side, the Romanian manager is used to get respect and his authority is not something to consider lightly. Then, one day, you have a member of the UK “basic” staff talking to the Romanian manager as he/she does with the British one: openly. And for some reasons the dialogue from that day has not worked very well and became more formal and cold. Nobody knows exactly why. After a while, the UK team starts to think that “these lot other there” are difficult to work with and quite incapable of proper communication. On their side the Romanian team suffers as well from the poor communication and think that the British are a bunch of difficult people, showing no respect for hard work and valuing the Romanian team work far under its real worth. In a word, both sides start to believe the other one is kind of crazy and at the minimum impossible. Of course, my scenario is not guaranteed to happen. Of course, individuals do not necessarily comply 100% with the “typical” behaviour of their country. Of course, the British in here could have travelled and be more prepared. Yes the Romanians do not have to be typical either. But whole in whole we all know in our guts that what I have described is possible if not likely. We know that this level of misunderstanding is not a crazy scenario and we also know that the consequences on a project can be dramatic. How do I answer the initial question I used as a title: Where on earth will we outsource offshore? I’ll suggest the following: integrate in the equation the cultural challenges of the situation! Do not overlook the problem and certainly do not consider that sharing American movies on TV will make us all Americans. This is a doomed approach and also a costly one. Prepare your staff. Prepare the offshore staff. Use the services of someone experienced in such matter. Always always keep an open mind when you are in trouble and start thinking the other side is impossible. What about you? Are you impossible to work with? I could carry on and I probably will in a future article. Meanwhile, let’s think about IT!
Cross-cultural communication is a challenge for everyone! As Gert Jan Hofstede puts it in Exploring Culture, “Cross-cultural misunderstanding is a much under-estimated cause of trouble.” I am currently working a lot on this question for different reasons and I am very attentive to every cross-cultural trouble I am in front of. Working in London UK is a wonderful playground for the cross-cultural observer. When you study cultures, the one topic that you need to be aware of is stereotypes. Almost every nation is seen with some specific attributes in the eyes of the other countries. To mention just a few, Germans are very organised, French are wine experts, English drink tea all day long, Italians speak a lot, etc. If you are a disorganised German or a very quiet Italian will not do any good as you are not as expected anyway. I remember a situation like that when I was 25. I was travelling the USA for 2 months. I was lucky enough to know a couple of families over there. These friends did something very good for me: they arranged for me to travel the country almost always from friends to friends; these friends sending me to other friends and so on. That was fantastic! But something I was not expecting happened to me at some point. In new-Orleans, I met a lady who had been informed of my arrival. And guess why she was waiting for me? …Because she wanted me to kiss her hand in order to say hello. Man! I had never ever kissed anybody’s hand before in my life! The only thing I knew was that you are not actually suppose to really “kiss” the hand and that to do it properly; you don’t bring the hand to your mouth but your mouth to the hand. Well, in any case, you should never disappoint a lady! I was lucky enough to have been tipped beforehand and could prepare myself for it. So I did kiss her hand. As far as I know she was delighted. On another occasion during that trip, I had the opportunity to discover another feature of “frenchism” I was not expecting, but this time i was less lucky. In Delaware, I was invited for dinner by some friends and they took me to the local wine shop before the dinner to choose some good wine. The trouble was, at that time, I knew nothing about wine. I did not like wine and never drunk any (I have fixed that since). I told my friends but they did not believe me. So, I thought that, as I did with the new-Orleans lady, I should not disappoint. Then I picked a bottle of wine from a region I knew my family was fond of. We went home, opened the bottle and they asked me to taste it and give my opinion. I did. My opinion was as vague as I could decently be and I asked for theirs. I’ll never forget that one: they found the wine really average to remain polite. I failed and somehow disappointed. What sort of Frenchman was I? Since then, and especially to avoid that shame again, I have decided to study wine and I consequently created a few wine clubs of my own. But that is another story. In fact, I did not start that text in order to tell you about my wine misery but to tell you about cultural stereotype. As you see it is important to understand what stereotypes you have in mind for other nations and maybe be ready for the fact that everyone from that country is not necessary complying fully with the stereotype. Now, I think it would be useful, in order to prevent cross-cultural misunderstanding, to not only be aware of stereotypes we have in mind for others but also stereotypes we have in mind for our own nation. Somehow, when you are travelling or dealing with foreigners, you have in the back of your mind something about what you should be as a whatever-country-you-are-from. This stereotype might change your behaviour in ways you would not think too much of otherwise. A true American looks into the eyes when shaking a hand! Check that dialogue between Rollin Hand and Mr Bad guy. And see as well how the other candidates know their lesson better than Rollin Hand. Look at their eyes! That’s very amusing! A true American woman knows how to behave with a man compared to these comrade girls from central Europe! Cinnamon needs to get the attention of Mr. Bad Guy and almost fails because she was not behaving as decently as a true American woman would do. Have a look at that! I found that very amusing because in this very case, the caricature is coming directly from the nation itself. It is not how the others see the Americans but how the Americans see themselves compared to the rest of the world. I certainly do not pretend to take any lesson from a Mission Impossible episode regarding cross-cultural communication. I certainly do not even wish to judge in any way the content of that episode which is all about the cold war. I wonder what the TV series could have been on the other side. As exaggerated I suppose! Last but not least: this illustration is about Americans, but I am convinced that we could find similar examples for other cultures by searching other movies. Americans are not better or worse than anybody else at that. Do not take me wrong, this is not about Americans, or Germans or French or whatever, this is about culture perception, nothing else! In the end, I just wanted to say that we should always be aware of what we believe the others are like but also what we believe we personally are before working in a cross-cultural environment. The awareness of both sides should defuse a good load of troubles! Let’s think about IT!
“Please sign here!” Every time I hear that sentence I am worried about what I am doing. And every time I am in the same situation: I have to sign to move forward but I am leaving part of my freedom away. This is true when you get a mortgage or a credit, when you sign a mobile phone contract, an energy supplier contract or actually, every time you sign a contract with somebody more powerful than you are. Even when I sign a letter I wrote myself I might be worried about what the receiver could do with it, provided the receiver is a powerful administration.
But why, are you asking, is he telling us about these signatures that we all know about anyway? I am because as a consultant in software project optimisation, I have been asked again and again how we can reconcile sign-offs and iterative process. This is most of the time the case in organisations coming from a strong waterfall process culture. Before answering that question, I’d like to analyse what it means in a software project to get these sign-offs. Recently, we were consulting for a rather big public service which had troubles with their software delivery. Basically, they had reached a point where the business side of the projects almost refused to sign any kind of requirements document. They were saying that they did not understand the content well enough. So they were delaying sign-offs as far as they could and incidentally creating a mess in the IT department’s schedule. The business did not want to sign and the technical team refused to start before sign-off. Why? Because, they say, the business people can’t make their mind and always change their view of what is needed. “You can’t work with people like that.” In fact, I would say that this organisation had reached a kind of honesty point where everyone was recognising almost heart fully that the other side was a bunch of crooks. …But were they? Do not forget that they were all part of the same organisation!
Everywhere we have implemented such approach we have the business getting addicted to this delivery mode and the level of trust is rising like mad! If you want to have a better idea of the in depth reasons why this is happening and why the business if empowered again in front of IT, you can check on my previous article Iteration size and the tap water glass. Let’s think about IT
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The first sample chapter is going to get out of the printer today or tomorrow. This chapter is about requirements. The title is Extraordinary Requirements Quality. It is printed for my next talk at the Develop conference. I have worked a lot on the Games Industry in the past year. I have studied projects from the inside thanks to a major games publisher. I also have played games like never before in my life. Man, I could tell you some stuff about the experience of becoming a gamer when you are not 15 years old! Maybe in a next article…
If you are running a business in UK, especially in London, you are very likely to be working with people from all over the world. Since I am presenting seminars and business chats on cross-cultural communication, I am often asked what the implications are on a business. I have already presented some aspects of it in the perspective of off-shore development. I shall now consider the angle of business in general. So, in short, what if you are working with colleagues, partners, providers who are from another country?
Before going further I will quickly recap what culture is about in the context of this article. I am using the definition given by Gert Jan Hofstede: Culture is the unwritten book with rules of the social game that is passed on to newcomers by its members, nesting itself in their minds. In other words, it is the sum of all the rules you have learned when you were a kid without necessary knowing you were learning them. They were just “the way to do things”. There are several depths in what makes culture. If we think of it as an onion with layers, in the outskirt we would have the Symbols made of Words, Gestures, Pictures, and Objects that carry a particular meaning only recognised as such by those who share the same culture. These symbols are easily developed and copied from other cultures. It is the layer that will be the easiest to change.
the British people and history in a snap. No more than you replace Buffalo Bill or Martin Luther King (Please, I do *not* compare Buffalo Bill and Luther King intrinsically but only as names attached to acts and values you respect or despise).
asking “How are you doing?”, the way you serve tea, the formula at the beginning and end of a letter, the level of familiarity you allow yourself with people at first encounter and thereafter, how you give a present, a business card, how you invite people and how you visit those who invited you. The list is endless but you understand that none of these thing are summarised somewhere in a book. You “know” them and that’s it. These rituals are very difficult to change for real in your mind. You might adapt slightly but do you really understand the deep meaning of these actions when you learn them as an adult? 
Now what happens during a job interview? First of all we have to convene that this situation is highly charged in rituals. From the chosen room to the chosen desk to the chosen team to run the interview, it is very unlikely that the context of the interview is not carefully thought and managed by the interviewer.
Regarding piercing and tattoos, once again I could imagine that in UK (up to a certain level of course) but hardly in France for a managing job. I remember working for a huge bank in the city and having my manager (on the customer’s side) being a lady, biker and tattooed. That never bother anybody around that she was in charge of a big department. I can hardly imagine the same thing in France. You’d have to hide your tattoos carefully. This is even truer about piercings.
What is important to understand is that there is absolutely no right or wrong in either side of the interview. In both sides people will do what they have been taught to do when they were kids. This has nothing to do with the language you talk and speaking English, German or French will not tell you the rules we are talking about. This is why I am always smiling when I hear someone saying that they have given responsibility of an office abroad to someone based on the fact that this person knows the language. This is nowhere near enough. Culture is all about these things you don’t “see” unless someone told you to look at them. And the most treacherous part of the problem is that very few people are aware of their own rules. So, unless you genuinely understand where things can go wrong, I’d bet they indeed will go wrong at some point.
I was recently delivering a Cross-Cultural Communication Workshop for a customer which has decided to outsource in Romania. This workshop was part of a longer seminar designed to get both British and Romanian team acquire the same understanding of the project along a proper team building. This seminar happened about 20km from Dracula’s castle. By the way, for those who would not know, Dracula has indeed existed. He named was Vlad III, prince of Valachy (today Romania), but although he was incredibly violent and probably sadistic, he was not a vampire. I recommend reading his biography as I did if you are curious. Back to my topic, I have to say that it is the first time that I am working on a project that is started with so much care and energy, a real good start, but that is another story. So I had to prepare a specific workshop related to culture. And by culture, here I do not mean sharing the same movies, music or even type of clothes. Even sharing the same language is not relevant. I mean what is making a people a people; what is giving in individuals this feeling of belonging to a specific group of human beings on this planet.
Why on earth am I worried about what I am signing off? After all, in almost all cases I even looked forward to get to that point. I did want to buy that expensive stuff that I will pay over 55 years. I did want to get that mobile connection so that I can be disturbed any time or indeed disturb anyone I want any time I want. I did want that life insurance that will protect me and my family. So what’s wrong? The answer is trust. I actually do not trust a single second that the other party will play a fair game. First of all the contracts I am signing are made of 4 to 10 pages of famous small prints. I am asked to sign when I have not read any of these lines. Should I want to do it, the person in front of me would find that outrageous. Should I decide to indeed read it, I would not even understand what I am signing anyway. And believe me, I am not someone giving up in front of words.
My answer to that is of course connected to that dreadful signature that you need to put on that big fat un-understood document. The very reason why you have a need for a signature on a document is because you do not trust the other part for doing their job in the first place. If you do trust the other party, then this document is seen rather differently as a way to state what we both believe is what needs to be done. If things change in time, as we both trust each other, we will re-read that document and surely amend it as needed. That is what I do with trusted partners. Yes we have paperwork done but we all know that this is not what our deal is based on in reality. In fact, if you really try to describe in writing what a proper, honest, healthy deal is based on, you end-up with or a very light document describing in a few lines what the objectives are, or you end-up writing forever all the things you mean, you meant, you will probably mean and you surely would mean otherwise. It is mission impossible! That is why these law firms are making such a huge amount of money for writing a contract. And guess what? Even with these big fat contracts, the same law firms will make even more money in trial to explain the proper interpretation of that contract. It is hopeless! My view is that there is no need for building relationships on these bases. I would even say, it is the top level management responsibility to make sure that internal departments of the same organisation do not apply these hopeless rules to projects supposed to increase the business profitability. It is almost a crime to do so!
And here comes a better approach with the iterative software development processes. I will not explain in detail what this is about because it is almost common knowledge nowadays and it would take longer than this text to do so. In short, for those who have not boarded the train yet, iterative development is based on the idea that you will not wait for the final version of any specific step to do the next one. You will develop the software in small chunks. But mainly: you will deliver the software regularly from as soon as possible. As a result of these deliveries, you are building guess what? Indeed: trust! Where is the signature then? Oh sure you can maintain them if you wish. What about signing there for the piece of work we will deliver next week? Great, let me sign that and see you next week to make sure that I get what I have in mind. It is much more of a gentlemen handshake than a lawyer contract. If by any chance you do not get what you had in mind, you will make it known and make sure that you get it next week. And believe me; nobody in the IT department will be bothered by a change to do on a one week work.
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