Rules to Better Outsourcing

When dealing with western people, you want to avoid having screen captures showing foreign characters.

Let us look at some examples:

Communication can be difficult (even if English is your first language!). When using Microsoft Teams/Zoom, it might be tempting to only chat via text in IM, but this will not improve your skills or build a relationship as well as communicating verbally.

Timezones can make communication and collaboration difficult, but there is a silver lining! If there is a time-sensitive task you can asynchronously collaborate and get it done faster. Imagine a relay race, where you pass the baton to the next runner. This is how you should think about collaborating across timezones.

To do this effectively, you need to do a project handover every day. This takes a lot of thorough documentation and communication.

Send an email at the end of your day to the person in the other timezone. This email should contain the progress you made today, any decisions that were made, and any big changes that impact the rest of the work.

You should list the remaining tasks and ask them to reply if they have completed the tasks from the previous email.

Passing the baton

✅ Figure: Good example – A nice handover email to your coworker in another timezone, repeat this process until the task is complete

If there is business hours overlap, get a checked by from the recipient.

Use Time Zone Converter – Time Difference Calculator

Time Zone Converter – Time Difference Calculator provides time zone conversions that account for Daylight Saving Time (DST) and local time zones, while supporting present, past, and future dates.

Figure: For these locations there are only 2 small green spots that overlap for normal working hours

Email is great. But in an emergency, you need to pick up the phone. Often the most effective methods of communication for a project is to talk directly to colleagues and clients on the phone.

When working remotely, you should be sharing your screen whenever discussing changes to a document or software. This allows your colleague or client to see changes that are happening on the screen, making the remote collaboration experience much nicer.

When a company has many different office locations, often people in one office aren't familiar with people in other offices due to a lack of interaction. This problem is particularly pronounced where you have offices that span multiple time zones or countries.

Many companies use overseas developers to do some of their work, but the language barrier can sometimes extend past simply communications. Sometimes you can end up with foreign language snippets in your code too.

When you edit an aspx page in TFS, follow the below steps to avoid having Chinese characters appear.

Make sure your Visual Studio encoding is consistent with Sydney to avoid encoding problems in the future.

Say your language is Chinese, of course, local Chinese customers would feel more comfortable communicating in Chinese. The disconnect happens when head office needs to get involved. They can't review emails, read the history of email threads etc.

Improper spelling, grammar, and punctuation gives a bad impression of your company and can result in your message not being conveyed correctly.