Initiator: Sushil Bhattachan
Note taker: Sushil Bhattachan
Participants: 8
Discussion / Key Concepts / Quotes / Revelations / Highlights
Discussed about offshore contract model to better engage offshore team .
1. It was agreed that as we move from waterfall to agile its even more important to have motivated offshore team members as we give more autonomy to offshore teams. And if team members are not motivated it could make productivity worse than water fall.
2. In T&M contract model offshore management do not have high interest to motivate team to provide higher productivity and higher quality cause all they care is no of people are hired by their client. Offshore management mentioned that they have to pay more to keep people for multiple years in the same project as in T&M onshore client wants to keep same person for long. However they mentioned though they keep people for long by paying more the team members are disengaged being in same client company for long. So they do not have leverage to bring new people as new people are more engaged for few early years. And they want a way to pay by performance rather than no of people and higher pay for retention of an employee. Fixed cost would be better but with Agile we can not do that as well.
3. So we brain stormed to see if we can help change the contract model from T&M to something more incentive based so that offshore management is engaged to motivate their employees better.
4. Topics we brain stormed with team.
4.1 Penalty for not meeting SLA
4.2 Reward for meeting sprint goals.
4.3 Pay by velocity or incentive by higher velocity with base payment.
4.4 Measure output by person.
5. However we did not find good agile way to change the contract.
Recommendations / Next Steps / Actions
As we discussed many ways, we could not find good agile way to amend the contract. And team decided that it is really not contract issue, rather an engagement issue. And trying to amend contract might not help. So here are some recommendation to engage offshore team.
1. Have Tech lead/ Proxy PO in Offshore team.
2. Have complete team in offshore; do not mix and match.
3. Offshore team in one location.
4. Use communication tool like Mumble, Discord etc.
5. Incentive to onshore incharge for better output from offshore.
6. Onshore team value work completed by offshore, that’s where the main engagement energizer.
7. Make offshore team provide full transparency of what they worked and how much they complete each day.
8. Share vision from onshore executive to offshore team and make them feel part of the team. And not just once a quarter.Over market the vision.
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