Recently, on a flight to Bangalore India and in the ensuing boredom I struck up a conversation with the passenger sitting next to me.
After a short chat it was clear we had something in common professionally. It turned out that “Mr X” was a senior software engineer for Honeywell and responsible for the developing of new fly-by-wire flight systems.
“Wow” how interesting! A branch of IT I knew little about, and an opportunity to learn something new.
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I have just come back from a trip to Bangalore India having been asked to set-up for a well known consultancy an offshore software development centre.
Complete Gridlock
Bangalore was selected because there is already a significant offshore IT development presence by companies such as Accenture, Honeywell Bull, Intel, IBM. It was decided that here I would pull together resource in order to set-up a 200 to 300 man software development factory.
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I rarely mention by name organisations who I have done business with in the past. However, today I want to mention a little known IT consultancy called Avanade. It is a company born out of a unique partnership between Microsoft and Accenture and is a global IT player specialising in the Microsoft platform. It is not Avanade’s undoubted technological expertise which fascinates me, its the organisations ability to deliver outstanding profitability to its shareholders and world-class delivery capability to its customers.
The pursuit of excellence is a means to an end for Avanade.
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So what do we mean by the term Offshoring for the Newbie Project Manager?
“It is the relocation of business processes to a lower cost location, usually overseas”.
In theory this looks an almost “too good to be true” opportunity to increase profits through reduced production costs via the exploitation of cheap foreign labour. The expectation with respect to IT software development is a promise of cost reductions in the region of 30% to 40%. The management consultants convince clients that all you needed to do in order to encapsulate this cost saving into your balance sheet, is to carry out, with their help, an IT staff change-over similar to changing out an old car engine and replacing it with a new one made in India or China. Make this happen and “he presto you’re in the money”.
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Most project managers are aware of UML, even if they haven’t used it themselves.
However, having worked as a Business Analyst on a number of ‘UML projects’ I believe that many Project Managers don’t really know how to use UML requirements gathering techniques to maximise the chances of a successful project.
I am going to try to help you understand some of the pitfalls and issues that are all too often encountered when setting up a UML based IT project.
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