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> The potential benefit of having part (but not all)
> of your document team overseas is that the
> overseas team members are online while the
> US-based members are off for the night. If
> you device an effective hand-off methodology,
> you can have the overseas team members
> continue working on documents after the US
> members have gone home for the night.
When everything goes right, that works great. I work all day Tuesday,
email my preliminary document at 5 p.m. to Nagendra or Nikolai or
whomever on the other side of the planet, then come back to the office
at 9 a.m. Wednesday to find the finished doc in my inbox.
In my experience, however -- with offshore software engineers and chip
designers, not techwriters -- it's almost as likely that I send the
thing out Tuesday evening, then Nagendra "has a doubt" at around 10 a.m.
his time and sends me an email to clarify something. He can't continue
until I answer his query, so he twiddles his thumbs for the rest of the
day.
I come in on Wednesday, see his email and answer it -- usually
apologizing for assuming that he knew something that he WOULD have known
had he been attending all the meetings here in the States -- then I
twiddle MY thumbs for the rest of the day.
He gets my email, finishes the work, emails it to me, and I finally get
it on Thursday. We've only wasted a day, bit it's a day EACH, and it
doesn't take many of those over the course of a large project to make
our product really, REALLY late.
Usually, of course, someone notices that the turnaround time is getting
out of hand and suggests that we could improve things by having daily
telephone conferences as we perform the handoff. That's a great idea...
Except that it means one of us is always tired and annoyed because he's
staying at work a couple hours later than usual to make the call, and
the other is always tired and annoyed because he's waking up a couple
hours early to receive the call. With neither of us at his best during
those phone calls, we often fail to catch the problems that the calls
are supposed to solve.
-Andrew
=== Andrew Warren - awarren -at- synaptics -dot- com
=== Synaptics, Inc - Santa Clara, CA
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