A survey of major approaches for accelerating new product development. Typical challenges such as coordination, communication and culture differences presents a bigger challenge to FTS than GSD, as FTS involves daily hand-offs. Although these regions share the English language, there were cultural differences, for example, “one culture has more emphasis on self-sufficiency; therefore they tend not to ask for help when problems come up. It must also ensure that all the required information and reports to continue the work are visible and easily accessible. There exist several case and field studies over the years, which resulted in challenges and best practices of FTS. The follow the sun model is a service and support method that is designed to address and satisfy customer needs without regard to geographic location or current time. The work involved a software project developed by teams in Mexico, India and Australia, which followed Scrum. The result was that the project was completed in 5.5 weeks, while it was estimated to be completed in 6 weeks in non-FTS mode, so it reduced time. They meet their global support goals by working together, providing a combined 18 hours a day of coverage. Advances in Software Engineering, 2009:3, 2009. Proceedings, pages 218{224. Working normal daylight hours keeps employees happy, healthy, and motivated to work while your company is still able to offer round-the-clock service. Most agile practices emphasize face-to-face communication. Focus on those regions first. 3. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, anyone can learn to work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. Software tools used for actual FTS implementation must include both managerial and technical aspects, to adapt to the changing requirements of the software development process. In an Agile based methodology, all major development activities (design, code, test and integrate) are carried out in every iteration cycle. If your business proceeds with follow the sun, managers should do their best to schedule meetings when it’s most convenient for both locations, and IT should adopt video conferencing and cloud-based solutions for everyone to work together. Ideally this is a more experienced agent who can help keep everyone on the same page, and to be the point of contact for urgent issues and events affecting the team. One of the important concepts evolved in the past decade or so is the “ Follow the sun ” (FTS) software development. In California, they have team start times of 7am, 8am, and 9am (PST). Treinen and Miller Frost [19] published a case documenting two cases of FTS implementation at IBM. If your team is still in the lean, jumping phase, you might not be ready to offer global support. [17] Amar Gupta, Rajdeep Bondade, and Nathan Denny. It turns out, however, that the method scales down to satisfy a specific goal: providing superior customer support. It was developed to provide round-the-clock customer service, literally “following” the sun around the globe. It’s really important that every customer service agent receives the same training experience and tools. Teams must be able to define what work has been done and what work is expected next in the process. Carmel [6] argues that only the nature of some phases of the development cycle such as testing are well suited for FTS. Agile seems to be the best and most suitable for FTS based approaches because the principles of Agile anf FTS complement each other. Your approach and strategy here depends on the specific goals and accountabilities you create for your team and the service level agreements you offer to your customers. A subteam can consist of one or more members. If you're a small company looking to provide global support, consider what steps you can take now to achieve your longer-term support goals. IEEE, 2009. While you won’t all be in the same room for these meetings, video conferences are fairly easy to set up and schedule. Overall it was found that increasing the number of sites in a daily cycle increased the working speed. Prashanth G.L, Santosh Malagi, Laurens Van Den Bercken, Ade Setyawan Sajim and Bernd Kreynen are the authors of this blog. To help decide what’s best for you, your team, and your customers, ask the following questions. Based on the discussions in the Principles of FTS section which explains the minimum criteria for a work flow to be considered as a FTS approach, the following do not fit in this category [1]: Agile software development practice consists of a set of principles which advocate continuous improvement, adaptive planning, early delivery and flexibility in responding to change. Because it is always daytime somewhere in the world, you need a way to support customers around the globe no matter what time zone they are in and without too much delay. [19] Treinen, James J., and Susan L. Miller-Frost. Knowledge transfer and sharing of project critical information with concerned parties is essential for smooth operation of the project. Your plan needs to include specific roles, processes, and training necessary to meet customer expectations. [8] Christian Doerr. Modern day software development is spread more and more across national and international boundaries. The top three best practices that were found in research are agile methods, the use of technology for knowledge sharing (e.g. FTS is a special case of GSD which aims to achieve a 100% workday in software projects. [14] Josiane Kroll, Sajid Ibrahim Hashmi, Ita Richardson, and Jorge LN Audy. Pearson Education India, 1995. The model you choose, develop, and refine should be the one that works best for you and your customers. Agile stresses on the importance of automated testing to reduce time. These are reactive in nature. How do companies similar to your own handle support? Because of its uncommon nature, FTS is also least practiced in the industry and has very few documented examples of success. Agile also provides an opportunity for every team to maintain a sustainable pace of development i.e. Sometimes it’s just a matter of letting the customer know there will be a short wait until a native speaker can respond, or to make it extra clear which languages are supported in each region. Hand-offs are the central idea of the FTS approach. The follow the sun model is a service and support method that is designed to address and satisfy customer needs without regard to geographic location or current time. As described by Carmel [1], the agile methodology is best suited for FTS. It’s also great if you can provide a knowledge base of training resources and material, accessible at any time. The most popular online Visio alternative, Lucidchart is used in over 180 countries by more than 15 million users, from sales managers mapping out prospective organizations to IT directors visualizing their network infrastructure. It is interesting to note that there have been very few documented cases of successful FTS application in the software industry. Mechanisms for transferring work in progress to the next site is the core idea of FTS. Apart from the usual difficulties faced in globally distributed software development, FTS also has the additional challenges of managing daily job hand-offs. In this section we give a number of research themes within Follow-the-Sun software development research. Service and development sites are spread out across many time zones, allowing work to be passed from location to location. Global software development: never mind the problems – are there really any benefits? To this end, the FTS research needs to be done comprehensively, so that companies start adopting it in real-time projects. Companies large and small are able to provide 24-hour service without putting the burden on one site and requiring employees to work late shifts or overtime. Selecting locations for follow-the-sun software development: Towards a routing model. Increase response time to solve problems more quickly, and reduce development and production times to get products and services to market faster. This model ensures that none of your service locations are neglected or receive preferential treatment, especially if you work at a global company. IEEE, 2014. Although this seems like such an intuitive idea to work with, it is not practiced widely, misunderstood often and has had few documented industry success cases. The above principles allow FTS to be used in any knowledge work (not just software development). But not every industry really requires that. A systematic literature review of best practices and challenges in follow-the-sun software development. WDSGlobal case study: In 2004 a study conducted within the company of WDSGlobal reported the following list of what worked in FTS software development (when doing Extreme Programming) [7]: The study reported the following lessons that were learned: The study involved teams from the USA, UK and Singapore. ), Trust your agents to make customers happy, Want to provide great retail CX? IEEE, 2013. The process of hand offs must be smooth and conflict free. The FTS approach is based on the principle of handing-off unfinished work to the next location at the end of work day. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(1):17-38, 2010. In reality, setting up a Help Center doesn’t have to be a monumental task, and by offering community forums, you can give your customers the chance to help each other. Lastly, we showed that there was a study which researched hand-offs management. Adopting a follow the sun support methodology can help you provide high-quality, on-time service and support when your internal and external customers need you. Start with your employees, Successfully build and manage a virtual customer service team, The 3 pillars of effective sales leadership, State of Messaging 2020: Conversational business goes mainstream, Recruit, hire, and onboard customer service representatives. Three important companies which documented their experience is summarized below. 7. Handoffs management in follow-the-sun software projects: a case study. But these steps will add to the increase in cost due to burnout and fatigue [2]. Software developmentusing the 24-hour knowledge factory paradigm.