Working with offshore teams p.1

Are you working with offshore vendors/teams that do not perform, and you don't even know what the heck they are doing over there? Probably sitting on their butts all day smoking cigars, and that is in the best case? Demonic laughter should be inserted here, but seriously though.

I've been on both sides for a long time, and very often, setting up collaboration and communication channels is a challenge. Cultural differences, time differences, and physical distance do not help either. But before you kick out your current vendor and start it all over with another one, take a hard look at your own processes. Likely you are doing it wrong, and it is adding up to these problems. There are some questions to ask yourself before engaging with any vendor:

1. Is your team ready to work with distributed teams? It is a huge deal and 99% of success. If your team is not ready, no collaboration will happen. People just don't realize that trivial tasks like simple environment setup can be very challenging if you can't ask a colleague sitting next to you for help. And if there is a time difference - some schedule adjustments will be necessary on both sides.
2. Is your team WILLING to work with external vendors? You would not believe how many times I've heard something like - "vendors should do as they are told, they are not here to think." It is like buying a Porsche and driving 15 miles an hour.
3. Do you have the infrastructure to accommodate remote access? Nowadays, with clouds being widespread, it is less of a problem, but security and privacy considerations are still there.
4. Have you communicated the importance of all this to your team? It seems to be self-evident, but it is not evident to 80% of your team if they were not a part of the offshore team once.

Some of these problems can be mitigated to a point by having part of the remote team locally; oftentimes, just having a dedicated team lead locally is enough.

Best results are achieved IMHO when both sides realize that extra communication efforts will be needed. Usually, companies that already have great remote work ethics and transparent communication channels can integrate with the least effort.