Agile Development

Cost of Low Cost

Okay, how about this question - would you offshore your Agile software development if the expense came out of your pocket?  We will guess no again. There is a cost to offshoring Agile software development; it is quite a bit higher than advertised and may not be a cultural fit for many offshore teams.

Sure, we are aware of the published research on IT offshoring trends and all those ”demonstrated” advantages; lower overall cost and/or increased productivity because you can hire more people, etc.  We are sure in aggregate this is somewhat true; funny numbers abound though. What the majority of offshoring budgets typically underestimate, or forget to include, are costs such as hiring strong leads to manage dependencies, onboarding new hires due to high turnover, travel expenses, investments in infrastructure, longer work hours for everyone, handoffs, delays, etc...

In the end much of the expected savings is drained by these “unanticipated” expenses. To compound the problem many of these initiatives have slower delivery times, lower quality, an increase in frustration for all sides.

Great Agile teams are empowered. They experience conflict. They voice their opinions and fight for what they believe in. They are passionate and curious. They are transparent, headstrong, and unafraid. And they function best in an environment where decisions are made quickly.

In our experience though, we don’t see these characteristics exhibited by many offshore teams. 

Why? While there are certainly many variables at work, we have noticed that the culture has a large impact on the success of our Agile offshoring initiatives. We have learned that offshore teams come in two broad flavors:

• Culturally Compatible with Agile – These teams are spirited and unafraid to voice their opinions. They willingly take ownership of a product. They understand they are not perfect, are transparent about that fact, and are constantly working to improve themselves. Agile is a natural fit for these teams. While they will need support in the form of training and coaching in the formative stages there is every likelihood that they will eventually become a successful Agile team. In summary, due to culture, these teams will adopt Agile behaviors and deliver higher quality software more consistently.
• Culturally Incompatible with Agile – To put it bluntly, these teams are a nightmare! They almost always say “yes” to everything, never or rarely push back, challenge a design decision, a tight schedule, or tell us we are wrong about something. You can give them all the support and empowerment in the world but they will never feel totally comfortable taking ownership. For these teams, you are better served using a waterfall approach.  They just don’t get Agile and probably never will.

The Agile community has been silent on the subject of hidden costs and cultural alignment with Agile. Perhaps it is because the community does not want to offend employers, friends and co-workers. However, we cannot expect our army of commodity Agile coaches to deal with the problem. They certainly have not done so to-date.

When an offshore team’s culture doesn’t align with the core empowerment and transparency principles of Agile, we should just stay away from engaging them. Let’s stop pretending we are practicing good Agility with a lot of these offshore teams; we are not. Don’t you think it’s time to drop the political correctness and start being more transparent about these issues? Not doing so just hurts the Agile movement as a whole.