Processes  It’s your processes that will enable your people and your technology to carry out your delivery model. Technology-enabled processes define the how-to for managed cross-geography development.

Governance  Although too often overlooked, a strong governance model with business units and partners has always been necessary to ensure the delivery of business value. It’s a facet that becomes very important in the global development environment, especially as global development supports SOA and services deployments.

Getting from here to there in three phases

If you don’t already have a distributed development capability, CSC has a three-phase approach to building one.

Perform capability assessment  Organizations need an independent look at the current state of the development environment and processes in place to support business objectives. An assessment can vary in scope from addressing the customer’s entire software development organization to looking at a single software project. The goal is to assess your development process, evaluate the tools you are using, and identify opportunities for improvement. Some organizations may decide to stop here and build on the identified opportunities themselves.

Deploy a test environment  In the second phase, CSC recommends and creates the software architecture, tooling, and distributed staffing model assignments for a test environment. Deploying this environment requires close attention to software configuration management, to securely track all of your assets as they are updated and transferred from location to location. In addition, deployment services typically include training and mentoring for key staff roles. Deploying a new environment means changing the way people work, so it is essential to establish or optimize the change management environment. The dynamics of iterative development, including concurrent workflows by different teams working on shared artifacts, necessitates a focus on change management. 

Some organizations may decide to make this phase the first step of a quick-start approach that gives them an “instant environment.” This more aggressive option puts the tools right in your hands by deploying a starter infrastructure of a server, five seats of software, and global development process templates that are focused on global distributed development. These organizations then use those tools to do the same kind of capability assessment done in phase one and develop a go-forward plan and strategy built around the starter environment.

Configure process, establish workflow automation and measurement  Once a global distributed development model is established, it’s important to take a closer look at the labor and tasks being executed. The more you can automate the workflow, especially change information, the easier it is to manage distributed complexities and communication barriers. CSC will work with you to establish and monitor a common, configurable process that gives all team members access to guidance and tool mentors throughout the development life cycle. This process will also provide the metrics and reporting that team members and management need to get visibility into all dimensions of development and delivery.

Until very recently, global delivery was the specialty of a few firms, and it was focused on technical programming. That is no longer true. It will not be long before most companies will have to have global delivery capability, and not only for technical programming. As global delivery becomes a standard that applies to consulting, BPO, SOA, and architecture, building a distributed development capability becomes more critical.

Philip Karecki, of CSC Consulting, is the solution director in CSC’s New York office.

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