Complexity of Multiple Development Locations

There are multiple reasons why companies spread research and development activities into multiple countries. In some smaller countries it might even be that the job market is not big enough to cover all the needs or that at least talent is really hard to find. That's why it is many times natural to spread activities to locations where the talent pools are bigger. Also the salary level can be a tempting factor especially in cost competitive countries, like India.

But there are certain challenges that are good to keep in mind before taking the step. I have no hidden agendas, my intention is to simply state some things that you might want to consider before starting activities in a new location.

Time-zone differences are good to take into account. Of course they can even be a positive thing if you are looking for 24/7 response times in services and you need to follow the sun. But if you are attempting to have distributed teams (members in more than one time-zone), they will have a limited number of common hours. There are some 'sharing the pain' approaches to this, but none the less it's a real challenge.

I think that if at all possible, people who work together should meet face to face at least in the beginning of their common journey. That helps to build trust and makes the team work easier. It's also easier to explain things and build understanding while being physically close. While this is nice, it will of course create some expenses when people need to travel. Again by far no show stopper but something to consider.

Having multiple development sites has an effect on the communication also. With one site you can rely mostly on physical boards and getting people together, but with multiple sites you need to have proper technology. Things like online backlog tools and communication software become a must. And I think many will find chat tools like Flowdock or Slack beneficial. Internet connection speed will also prove to be important. This depends also on your products, but if you need to transfer gigabytes of data there's a big performance penalty if moving files takes hours rather than minutes or seconds. Thus the local infrastructure also plays a large role.

Job rotation pace also varies between countries. Somewhere it might be possible to stay with one employer for the whole career (maybe not realistic nowadays anymore) whilst in some countries people tend to switch jobs every couple of years. If employee turnaround is really rapid, tens of percents annually, building silent knowledge might be difficult. I mean such information that slowly accumulates while you learn more and more about your field. I think rapid job rotation is also where bad for good team spirit. It's not easy to build trust between people who often change.

Cultural differences should be also taken into account. Countries differ in many things. For example Finland, USA and India are really different. To better understand one another it is good to study a bit what kind of things are valued in the other culture. One nice site to check the differences between nations is here. There you can check how the six pre-selected factors differ. It might explain why your colleagues behave as they do.

Inflation rates are also really different between nations. For example in Finland the tech salaries are high, but there's hardly any inflation. In India it's vice versa. Salaries are in general smaller, but they are raised in bigger chunks and more often. And one of my guidelines is that in the global economy talent is cheap nowhere.

Final thing that comes to my mind is the local laws and amount of bureaucracy. I guess many times the amount of bureaucracy can be bundled with the amount of hierarchy, but that's just my assumption. (What I mean is that if you always need to get bosses bosses boss's signature, you are probably in a hierarchical and bureaucratic setup.) Having a local representative who knows the culture while starting activities up is probably priceless.

Well that was my not so short list of things to consider. Topics are not in any specific or prioritized order. But hopefully they will be useful for people who are pondering about spreading activities to new locations. Make sure you understand the challenges. Some are just risks that may or may not realize, but some of these you will encounter for sure. But if your plan is clear and you are doing it for the right reasons, you have a good change to succeed.

By the way, if you are academically interested in the topic, you might want to check out DD-SCALE project.