Working in an Offshore Team
I'm Leandro, a Product Owner/Business Analyst and sometimes Delivery Lead (we like to be T-shaped here) living in Melbourne, Australia.
One of the recruiting flyers
We were recently discussing ways to show how we have a successful offshore model with Brazil and I thought there was no better way than the actual people involved talking about their experience: I happen to be originally from Brazil, where I started working for Pragmateam through the partnership with DB and that's where this story 'from the trenches' begins.
The Partner in Brazil
Going back to 2017, I was working for DB in Brazil as a team lead in a project for Dell, where a team of engineers was creating a framework to boost test automation capabilities.
DB is a large Brazilian IT company that offers consulting services and a workforce for several clients, located in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil, and it has some global clients such as Dell Computers, which is how I come into play. Also important to mention, DB and Pragmateam are strategic partners for all sorts of delivery.
One day as I walked past reception I noticed a small flyer with a kangaroo promoting a new initiative called "Project Australia" (yeah, very original) and looking to build a team. I wasn't particularly looking for a new role but wanted to give it a try as it said there would be opportunities to travel to Australia, so why not?
The Project
Tabcorp, Australia's largest wagering company, was engaged locally with Pragmateam and looking to scale delivery capability through an end-to-end offshore team, which is how DB got involved.
What they wanted - which is also key when setting offshore delivery up for success - was to have a team with full ownership over features of their product and not just doing tech debt, tasks or low value work.
The Hiring Process and Team Setup
I'm suspicious to say it as I work for Pragmateam but I think the key reason offshore worked so well was because we not only had great T-shaped technical experts but they had plenty of empathy and were nice to work with.
The initial team back in Brazil in 2017
Selecting internally in DB or hiring people in Brazil for offshoring follows the very same process as Pragmateam hiring someone locally in Australia. There is an early recruitment chat with candidates, followed by a technical evaluation, technical interview and then usually followed by a chat with Juliano (Pragmateam's founder). With this, you can have an idea of how select people who join the team are. In our case, the initial team was a team lead, 4 full stack software engineers and a full stack QA.
After getting everyone started in the DB office, the next (and very important) step was onboarding everyone on the client, and what better way to do that than simply get all those people on a plane and fly them to Sydney?
Onboarding, Travel, Face-to-Face Time and Trust
Bonding with co-workers from Tabcorp
Having a good team is very important for any kind of work, either onshore or offshore. But even the best team can struggle to start delivering if the onboarding process is not well done, poorly documented, misses system access etc; it can be really painful. And it is even worse for offshore teams. So to mitigate that and accelerate the process we liked to - before the pandemic at least - take people from Brazil to Australia for around a month, and that happened lots of times.
In my onboarding specifically, I stayed in Sydney for around 3 months with all other team members. That was not only an amazing experience for us but it was also a very big win for the client as during this period we were able to pair with them, learn their processes, the business, and, most importantly, the people, creating bonds and establishing trust.
Pragmateam in 2018
And that's when our cultural alignment comes into play. From the very beginning, we try to be more than just a business partner but to create and sustain a good relationship with the people too. By having our onboarding onshore, we can meet and talk face to face to our stakeholders, co-workers, go out for coffee or a beer, and chit-chat. We become more than just a 'resource' on the other side of the world but someone they now know and trust.
Helena, our team's UXer working with the team in Sydney
Travelling happened more often than my memory can recall. We had a case where an engineer was sent to absorb the knowledge required to do a DevOps role from Brazil so that we could operate with fewer dependencies from the Australian team, manage ourselves and also the test environments without waiting due to timezone issues or people availability. We also did a similar thing when we needed a UXer to work onsite with us in Brazil, we sent her to Sydney for a whole month so that she could meet with the other UXers, learn their ways of working, and again, make sure people knew her, who she was and what she was capable of.
In the end, this added lots of value for the client as often we had people from our team allocated to help and support specific areas because we already had so much knowledge and know-how that they could use that to their advantage.
Running an Inception in Sydney with our engineers
A second part of the onboarding is that we did not travel only when we had new hires, but almost all the times we started a new engagement or feature. I went to Sydney at least 4 times to join Discovery/Inception workshops. It's a long journey from Brazil to Australia but very much worth it as it creates engagement which is often hard to get when working offshore since the team can't usually see or perceive how the work they are doing affects the client's business.
Oh yes, I should mention that this is not a one-way street where only people from Brazil go to Australia. We also had visitors coming from Australia to the office in Brazil to work close to us and understand our routine.
There was a moment where the trust in our team was so solid and we had so much knowledge about the business locally that Tabcorp asked us to run an Innovation Day ourselves from Brazil. This was to generate new feature ideas for the product we were working on, then showcase our ideas to senior execs who chose the best one and this winning idea was finally built by us and deployed in Production. There is even a nice video with it!
That's it for now. On Part 2 of this series on Working in an Offshore Team, I'll explain our routine and ways of working as an offshore team, the challenges and benefits we felt.