Anyone got any experience with offshore teams? I'm meant to be taking on the role of managing one in a month or two (yay...) Not quite sure what to expect.

All doom and gloom? Or any positive experiences?

I haven't done offshore, but just outsourcing in general is almost always a terrible experience.

Not once have I seen a piece of work come back that i could happily say, sweet, let's go to prod with this.

It's always been reworked to some extent or scrapped and done internally.

But hey; you might get lucky.

@C0D4 Sadly this lines up with my preconceptions. Out of my hands now though, so we'll see.

@rutee07 They have an offshore lead. I said there was no way I was doing it without a single point of contact.

I am offshore. And many teams in my office. Not to brag, but our client keeps firing onshore teams and creating new ones in our office, offshore. We are just THAT good :)

I guess it depends on who is working offshore. If those folks are responsible professionals then onshore could easily become your main driver.

A tip: be VERY clear about processes and handovers. Some overlap at the beginning/end of shift is required to have a live handover. Written one is only sufficient if the task/progress is very clear and straightforward. Team leads should be reachable a few hours after/before their shift, just in case smth unexpected happens/smth is not clear to onshore

Be very specific. Write everything down especially what you expect that has to be done. Expect no extra effort or best practices or the extra mile.

I guess it would be kinda cool to work from a ship

ahh, one more thing. Usually ONshore has all kinds of specialists available. As OFFshore time comes they often lack some specialists on their time. This is a painful drag.

Either fight to get at least one individual per specialization area (i.e. network guy, DB guy, perf guy, Ops guy, etc.) or get accesses to do their jobs yourselves. I'd vote for the former.

There's also a third option -- oncall individuals ONshore so that whenever OFFshore gets in trouble they could wake the ONshore oncall up and ask for assistance.

In my experience lack of accesses/knowledge of other areas but _ours_ slows ON/OFFshore model dramatically.

Get some paid working vacations at the offshore company and oversee the progress yourself in person. 😄

@heyheni That'd be great if I enjoyed travelling, but it's not for me. I like staying close to home.