Leading International Teams

by Ed Carroll, Sales Executive, Agilis Solutions

In late 2005, three panelists addressed an audience of senior engineering executives in a presentation that focused on software development with global teams. The moderator was Ed Carroll, a sales executive with Agilis Solutions, a business unit of Hepieric, Inc. To this discussion, he brought 25 years of experience in leading software-engineering teams dispersed across the United States, Japan, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and Vietnam. On the panel were the following individuals:

Dave Brown, vice president of Central Engineering, Instruments Business, Tektronix, Inc. – Dave has 26 years of engineering leadership, and Tektronix maintains a 15-year partnership, including joint design work, with Matsushita (Japan). Dave has managed international manufacturing in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom for more than five years, and he currently manages development teams in both India and Japan.

• Introduce team members to one other (international teams to U.S.-based teams and vice versa), preferably in-person with face-to-face working sessions.
• Introduce people who are new to the organization into the organizational culture (for example, can you imagine working for Intel without understanding its concept of constructive conflict?).
• Understand the cultural differences among team members.
• Build a sense of mission within the team at large so members will feel a sense of ownership toward achieving the corporate vision.
• Walk through the project scope carefully with the entire team.
• Pay as much attention to informal communication processes as to formal ones.

Dave Brown made the point that it is always faster in the long run to engineer any product if time is taken up front to provide direction, establish a sense of mission, build team cohesion and obtain clear understanding of processes. It may seem like progress is being made by skipping such steps, but progress soon bogs down with miscommunication, causing coding errors and other problems due to misunderstood direction and goals.

Documentation
Audience members then raised the issue of documentation, specifically the dichotomy between the need to be entrepreneurial and fast-acting and the need to provide detailed and robust documentation. Is there a way to effectively use team members working in another part of the world without requiring the home team to spend more time than is worthwhile creating in-depth documentation that would not be created were the work done by an internal (local) team?

Ted Wilson pointed out that much effective documentation is informal in nature. For example, pay attention to informal communication methods to ensure that key issues are well written; this is particularly critical to geographically dispersed teams. The advantage to writing down ideas and issues is that the idea or issue can then be revisited many times with many more people.