In any IT organization, when you assign a project to an onshore and offshore team structure, you should be able to track the project application lifecycle status and resource responsibilities. Accumulating this information in one place and tracking live updates can be challenging. Building communication channels between onshore and offshore locations using a dashboard is a sensible approach to bridge this gap.
The challenges faced while communicating with offshore teams
- Keeping morale high and ensuring team cohesion
- Direct communication among employees, higher management, and other stakeholders
- With a remote workforce, it is not easy to monitor who is working on what. Clear distribution of tasks and goals among the team members is required with routine tracking of task completion.
- Improving the productivity of the project with the help of periodic insights from all the teams involved
- Incongruity in infrastructure and processes used by the offshore teams is a major concern.
Dashboard Communication Solution
A dashboard is a simple methodical approach to make informed project/business decisions by using accumulated data at a glance. It aggregates and extracts the value from collected data and gives a real-time application health check which results in the ability to evaluate Key Performance Indicators. For onshore and offshore communication, dashboarding simplifies available data into manageable chunks in a visual representation which helps management see project progress as well as challenges.
The below picture illustrates the scenario for building an effective offshore and onsite project management dashboard:
How does a dashboard help with communication between onshore and offshore teams?
When onshore testing and development teams interact with the offshore team, they need to to be able to discuss project requirements. For instance:
- Number of test cases that need to be generated
- Number of tests that needs to be validated
- Ability to build the requirement traceability matrix
- Ability to build defect triage matrix
- Details about the number of test cases validated
- Dividing teams based on the responsibilities
- Assigning teams to maintain test validation
Here, the intent of discussion is not only confined to checking the health of the project, but also extends to providing all the required details to management to help monitor the resource performance level of the project workflow. The dashboard allows you to achieve this with ease. Let's take a look at a use case for an inside-out view to see how this works.
Use case: HP and Microfocus ALM are renowned test directors. These tools consist of project requirements, test plans, test labs, defects modules, and management modules. The management module provides details of the under-management module, which uses a dashboard to pull up all aggregated data from various individual modules and then extract the details from resource level performance reports. The whole set-up helps management understand all the necessary project details.
Let’s put it in this way!
During the development process, the ability to view the progress of each stage is crucial to evaluate project status. QA managers/management use these insights to plan their next move in the project, and this is where the need for dashboards arises. Pyramid Consulting provides an effective dashboarding solution for onshore off-shore communication to take the quality culture to the next level. With Pyramid Consulting's dashboard solutions, CIO's, developers, and testers can get insightful information in the test management system.
Our solution is a combination of KPIs and metrics-enabled management gauge, which evaluates and improves all factors of onshore off-shore communication models such as individual test runs, aggregated results, graphs, and statistics to analyze issues as well as blends all information to provide real-time status in the dashboard. Contact us to learn more about our services.
About the author
Practice Director, QA & Testing
Carl has been creating custom, forward-focused and effective QA solutions for Pyramid Consulting since 2012. Implementing the latest tech and thought leadership delights Carl just as it does clients. In his personal life, Carl focuses on doing things right and doing the right things—an important distinction—as efficiently as possible. If you need Carl urgently, check out your local drumming scene or the closest beach, otherwise you can find him at home with his beautiful and ever-growing family.