Regular . . . communication between . . . teams is . . . not . . . all . . . that . . . necessary . . . to success.
Do you agree? No!? Let me restate:
Complete communication . . . is . . . not . . . planning ahead.
You still don’t agree? Really!? Here now, I thought I was stating the obvious. I’m shocked! Let me try one more time.
Complete . . . teams . . . between . . . distance . . . high bandwidth . . . difficult . . . success.
You say you don’t understand? OK – now you’re just messing with me, I can tell. I’ll slow down and be perfectly clear. Then hopefully, we’ll be on the same page and can move on:
Regular, clear, complete communication betweenremote teams is the most critical aspect of success in managing projects from a distance. Notplanning ahead to establish allthe critical high-bandwidth communication “tools” thatare necessarycreates a very difficult road to success.
Now do you agree? I thought you might.
The loss of just a few words makes a tremendous difference in the message. We’re all aware of the communication challenges that two people can face, even when they’re together in the same room. Now, consider what happens when instead of two people you have 20, living in different parts of the world, speaking several different languages, coming from different backgrounds with totally distinct ways of seeing the world: You multiply the problem by several new dimensions that increase the likelihood of omission, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation.
So it is with a globally diverse team. Every day can bring new challenges borne of distance, culture, language, life experience, and time, making successful communication that much more difficult. The challenges facing a project manager who holds responsibility for a global project can be daunting. Just ensuring that members are clearly and consistently communicating with one another can easily take up the bulk of his or her time! In fact, perhaps it should.
Language Barriers
One of the most intelligent accomplished, savvy, and dedicated members of the casual game development community used to speak at length about “auditory perception.” I was puzzled by his apparent fascination with ears! I consistently frustrated him with my confused and slightly stupid nodding to his undoubtedly inspired insight. One day, I realized that when he said “auditory,” what he meant was “audience.” This was my first introduction to the practical impact of a “language barrier.”
The truth is that most of us have never been so personally affected by a language barrier that we’ve had to form a deep understanding of the subtle effects of it. Vocabulary plays a part—as do grammar, word choice, sentence structure, pronunciation, and other mechanics—but those are so obvious they rarely cause real issues. Consider this example: A colleague of mine is a very accomplished non-native English speaker. His vocabulary is probably wider than my own, as is his grasp of English grammar. I hooked him up with a co-worker (a writer, in this case) so that the two of them could quickly hash out the impact of story progression changes on engineering tasks. Ten days and three phone calls later, the issue still hadn’t been successfully addressed. For the fourth call, I joined in and was finally able to deduce the problem. The writer’s unfamiliar accent, which as a native-speaker I didn’t even hear, and his lightning-fast delivery was overwhelming my project manager’s ability to clearly comprehend the conversation! It’s pretty obvious how pacing of verbal delivery might contribute to a language barrier, even for a very accomplished English speaker. However, my experience with this colleague was that he understood English well enough that this was not typically a problem. The “aha” moment for me came when I discovered that language barrier challenges can be cumulative—that even though they might pose no significant problem individually, such moments of poor communications can stack up and inhibit understanding, even for a very accomplished non-native speaker.
Another, perhaps more insidious, example involves written comprehension: A map object in a recent game was entitled the “Living House” in the game design document. When I asked the development lead for a “better representation of a Living House,” I became increasingly frustrated when my requests were (apparently) ignored. At last the issue came to a head, and it was then that I discovered that “Living House” was being interpreted by the art team as “a house someone lives in” as opposed to “a house that is actually alive.” Surprise! A particular phrase, even if not idiomatic, might be understood in parts, but in combination it can create a meaning that only a native-speaker is likely to grasp.
Figure 1 - Dictionary.com lists 96 (!) definitions for the word "up". Above is a partial list. Explain THAT to a non-native English speaker.
Culture Gaps
There’s this guy—we’ll call him David—who grew up in the United States. As a small boy, his parents always had a car. Everyone he knows has a car and has had access to one since the age of eighteen. With a few exceptions here and there car ownership is a staple of American life. As a result, David’s sense of distance is skewed. Twenty miles is nothing! Just hop in the car and go! Even when he visits a city in the U.S. in which he has no car, he can usually get where he needs to go by way of reliable public transportation. Twenty miles? It’s no big deal.
Then there’s this other guy—we’ll call him Oleg. He lives in a place where traveling twenty miles is a pretty big deal, especially late in the evening when the buses or trains don’t run often. Car ownership is uncommon and public transportation unreliable—and as a result, such a trip can be difficult, time-consuming, expensive—or even dangerous! Oleg doesn’t “just hop in the car” ever.
Now, think what might happen if David and Oleg are working together on a project. When David asks Oleg to travel twenty miles to the office, or to home, or to get dinner, he’s thinking “no big deal” and doesn’t provide any options or opportunity for discussion. But when Oleg hears the request, he’s thinking “How in the world am I supposed to do that?” Since there is no opportunity for discussion, Oleg manages the best he can, but the project slows down and the staff gets more and more grumpy due to David’s apparent unreasonableness. Oleg and his team don’t know that David isn’t being inconsiderate on purpose. In the end the problem can be solved with a few extra dollars in the budget for late night cab fare, but it might not get discussed until it has become a crisis.
Figure 2 - Just getting from here to there can be an iffy proposition in some places. If this were your only option for a ride, you might be better off walking.
As some of you might have picked up, this example has a basis in a real-life experience, not a theoretical one. It illustrates the following point: We all tend to view problems, tasks, or situations through the almost imperceptible lenses our particular cultures impose. Life experiences and cultural mores tint our assumptions about the way things work. Unless you are extraordinarily well-traveled with a very well developed sense of both macro- and micro-differences in cultural perceptions, you may be subject to culture-based preconceptions without even realizing it.
Figure 3 - What would your reaction be if your neighbor painted this on his garage? If you live in Bhutan, where people paint phalluses on their homes to provide protection from demons, you wouldn’t think anything of it.
Time Warps
Personal electronics are largely responsible for making virtual global teams a reality. But while those electronics have done a lot to eliminate the challenges related to distance, they can do little to ameliorate the difficulties of working across multiple time zones. Simply stated, a project takes much, much longer if every question takes 12 hours to answer. The effects of a major time difference between project team locations can be obvious (you are sleeping while your lead programmer is awake), and at the beginning of a project, this seems pretty straightforward to manage. However, as any good project manager knows, the value of a time-slice goes up with each day you creep closer to the deadline. Time differences have a tendency to warp a schedule, creating a growing deficit over the course of a project: You have to wait eight hour to get the answer to a five-minute question; conversations get postponed until schedules align; you’re surprised by unfamiliar and unaccounted-for holidays; you lose a few hours here and there to misdirected development that cannot be redirected until the next day. Eventually you find yourself days or weeks behind schedule primarily as a result of little day-to-day gaps in your workflow.
This phenomenon exists in locally-managed projects as well of course—but there are two major differences. First, each individually contributed time deficit is much larger, but the time shift masks this. Losing a whole day of productivity with a local team is quite obvious because you get to experience each painful hour. However, with a team located half a world away, a full day of lost productivity just feels like a good night’s sleep. Second, if you think managing “crunch” with your local team is a challenge – whoo boy! You in for a treat managing that same crunch from five-thousand miles away.
Figure 4 - Know your time zones!
All of this really goes towards the point that, when managing team members spread out around the globe, time, distance, language, and culture differences conspire to make even the most seasoned local-team project manager sweat as timelines spin out of control or teams behave in apparently erratic and unpredictable ways. Overcoming those differences is less about developing a new set of skills and more about developing a different perspective. Once you have correctly recognized and truly internalized the validity of these issues, you can set about adapting your existing project management and communication tools to address them. It is only then that the language barriers will begin to fall, the culture gaps will start to close, and your global team will begin to work with the kind of efficiency that you have always envisioned.
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Since 1999 David Nixon (davidn@Oberon-Media.com) has dedicated himself to pioneering new ways for our "casual" games to reach new audiences. In 1999, with RealArcade, he was one of the first to see the potential of "try before you buy". In 2000 he was one of the first to attempt "2nd Party" publishing. In 2001 he was looking to Eastern Europe as a source of commercially viable PC games, inspiring game developers around the world to participate in the amazing opportunities this category offered. In 2004 he helped catapult Oberon Media onto the casual games world stage. 2005 found David evangelizing "console casual" games with his central role in the launch of Xbox Live Arcade. Now, in 2008 he works to revitalize the role of “web games” in the casual games sector, expanding the role of online communities in the future of our industry. He currently works as Executive Producer at Oberon Media
